Nursing Critical Thinking Paper

This paper will examine the purpose of Critical Thinking and its importance in the medical field, especially in the field of nursing. There are many aspects to nursing, but the two that will be discussed in this paper are critical thinking and concept mapping. Critical thinking is essential to skilled nursing; therefore, it is essential to nursing education. It is believed skilled nursing depends upon a well-reasoned philosophy of nursing rooted in a deep and rich conception of critical thinking. In the educational curriculum for nursing students, the focus has been to present problem-based learning and evidence-based practice concepts to help increase critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is the foundation in nursing to provide

A dynamic strategy for teaching students the skills to think critically is the concept map (a cognitive tool that encourages learners to process information deeply in order to understand study material). This study explores the development of critical thinking among nursing students in a required pathophysiology and pharmacology course during the first year of a Bachelor of Science in Nursing in response to concept mapping as an interventional strategy, using the Health Education Systems, Incorporated critical thinking test. (Facione, 2013) Students in the concept mapping group performed much better on the Health Education Systems, Incorporated than students in the control group. It is recommended that deans, program directors, and nursing faculties evaluate their curricula to integrate concept map teaching strategies in courses in order to develop critical thinking abilities in their students. Critical thinking is a complex reasoning process largely defined as the use of purposeful, shrewd judgment that involves the development and effective exploitation of multiple dimensions of cognition to interpret and analyze a situation and arrive at and act on a suitable conclusion or solution (Facione, 2013). Thus, CT involves higher-order reasoning and evaluation (Facione, 2013). Expanded nursing roles have

15). In a concept map, each word or phrase is connected to another and linked back to the original idea, word, or phrase. Concept mapping is considered a valuable active teaching method because it prompts learners to make connections and establish relationships between new concepts and prior schema (McMillan, 2010; Pottier et al., 2010; Sadler et al., 2015). Learners use graphic representations to depict their understanding of the meaning of a set of concepts, to organize and represent knowledge, to summarize and analyze their ideas, and to visualize their thinking (Lee et al., 2013). Concept maps have been used effectively in nursing education since 1984 (Daley & Torre, 2010; Harris & Zha,