Objective　To study the application effect of clinical pathway teaching in respiratory medicine. Methods　Seventy clinical medical students of our department during 2007 to 2009 were randomly divided into two groups. The control group（35 students） was treated by traditional teaching ways， while the experimental group（35 students） was treated by clinical pathway teaching ways， with 5 to 6 students forming a small group. Teachers provided one copy of the CP version to each person in advance. Then progressive questions and discussions were conducted according to the diagnosis， dif-ferential diagnosis and treatment of CP. After its implementation for a certain time， students were co-mprehensively assessed by the practice examination and questionnaire and the statistical analysis was performed by using SPSS 17.0 version statistics software. Results　The experimental group's total aver-age score was （90.00±4.00） points， while the control group's total average score was （76.00±7.20） points. There was significant difference between the two groups（P=0.001）. The effect of these two kinds of teaching was evaluated and compared in stimulating interest in learning（P=0.002）， improving the analytical ability（P=0.004），improving self-study ability（P=0.001）， deepening the under-standing of the basic concepts（P=0.112）， improving the innovation ability （P=0.005）， improving the efficiency of learning（P=0.034）， improving clinical comprehensive ability（P=0.016）， and improving the ability of language expression（P=0.000）， showing that teaching method of clinical pathway could significantly improve clinical teaching effect， and there was statistically significant difference between them. Conclusion　Clinical pathway teaching has obvious advantages in cultivating students' diagnostic thinking and clin-ical ability to solve practical problems， and therefore it has better clinical teaching effect than the tra-ditional teaching method.