Students’ and educators’ experiences with instructional activities towards critical thinking skills acquisition in a nursing school

Curriculum framework to facilitate critical thinking skills of undergraduate nursing students: A cooperative inquiry approach

AIM

Critical thinking (CT) is vital in assisting nurses to function efficiently in the ever-changing health care environment. A CT-based curriculum framework provides the impetus necessary to drive the acquisition of CT skills of students. Yet, there is no known CT-based framework contextualized to developing countries where seniority tradition is a norm. Therefore, the aim of this study was to develop a CT-based curriculum framework to facilitate the development of CT skills of nursing students in developing countries.

DESIGN

Cooperative inquiry.

METHODS

Using purposive sampling, 11 participants comprising students, educators and preceptors developed a CT-based curriculum framework.

RESULTS

Findings were organized into a framework illustrating interconnected concepts required to foster CT skills of nursing students. These concepts include authentic student-facilitator partnership, a facilitator that makes a difference; a learner that is free to question and encouraged to reflect; a conducive and participatory learning environment; curriculum renewal processes and contextual realities.

Constructing a critical thinking evaluation framework for college students majoring in the humanities

Introduction

Education for sustainable development (ESD) has focused on the promotion of sustainable thinking skills, capacities, or abilities for learners of different educational stages. Critical thinking (CT) plays an important role in the lifelong development of college students, which is also one of the key competencies in ESD. The development of a valuable framework for assessing college students' CT is important for understanding their level of CT. Therefore, this study aimed to construct a reliable self-evaluation CT framework for college students majoring in the humanities.

Methods

Exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and Item analysis were conducted to explore the reliability and validity of the CT evaluation framework. Six hundred and forty-two college students majoring in the humanities were collected. The sample was randomly divided into two subsamples (n1 = 321, n2 = 321).

Results

The Cronbach's alpha coefficient for the whole scale was 0.909, and the values of the Cronbach's alpha coefficients for individual factors of the scale ranged from 0.724 to 0.878. Then CFA was conducted within the scope of the validity study of the scale. In this way, the structure of the 7-factor scale was confirmed. Results indicated that the constructed evaluation framework performed consistently with the collected data. CFA also confirmed a good model fitting of the relevant 22 factors of the college students' CT framework (χ²/df = 3.110, RMSEA = 0.056, GFI = 0.927, AGFI = 0.902, NFI = 0.923, and CFI = 0.946).

Discussion

These findings revealed that the CT abilities self-evaluation scale was a valid and reliable instrument for measuring the CT abilities of college students in the humanities. Therefore, the college students' CT self-evaluation framework included three dimensions: discipline cognition (DC), CT disposition, and CT skills. Among them, CT disposition consisted of motivation (MO), attention (AT), and open-mindedness (OM), while CT skills included clarification skills (CS), organization skills (OS), and reflection (RE). Therefore, this framework can be an effective instrument to support college students' CT measurement. Consequently, some suggestions are also put forward regarding how to apply the instrument in future studies.