Study Of Measurement And Evaluation Methods On Critical Thinking Ability Of Nursing Undergraduates

ObjectiveThe aim of this study is to explore the methods which suit the nursing students to use,are convenient and easy to put it into practise,can measure and evaluate the abilties of critical thinking of nursing students objectively and scientificly. Ad hoc we design the critical thinking skills test and its application,which can offer suggestions to further train and develop the critical thinking ability of nursing students.Data sourcesPreliminary test:in one school, according to school number, we collect randomly 20 nursing undergraduates admitted by unified examination from Grade One to Four (every grade has 5 persons),and 10 nursing students who made special course of study at first,then undergraduatation from Grade One and Two (every grade has 5 persons),and 20 contra-aperture nursing undergraduates from Grade One to Four (every grade has 5 persons).We made the preliminary test on the above 50 persons.Formal test:the whole daytime system nursing undergraduates in two high medical colleges in Shanxi add up to 1560.Among the total,four-year system nursing undergraduates admitted by unified examination from Grade One to Four (at the end of school year) add up to 914,two-year system nursing undergraduates by special upgrade from Grade One and Two(at the end of school year) amount to 210,the number of four-year system contra-aperture nursing undergraduates from Grade One to Four (at the end of school year) is in all 436.The range of their ages is from 18 to 27.MethodsThis study is non-experimental.Based on literature study,we analyze and identify the study's carrying out theoretical foundation and evidence,adopt the tools with the critical thinking dispositions inventory,design the critical thinking skills test.Through preliminary test,we remeasured the reliability of inner consistency,remeasurement reliability and content,structure validity of the critical thinking dispositions inventory,in addition,we made specialist judgement, item analysis and factor analysis on the critical thinking skills test.The tools were applied to measure and evaluate the nursing undergraduates'critical thinking abilities.The nursing students from different classifications and grades,whose critical thinking abilities were analyzed and compared.The availability of the tools were further verified.Results The critical thinking dispositions inventory, Cronbach's a coefficient is overall 0.885,the range of each subscale is 0.424～0.689;remeasurement reliability is in total 0.887,the range of each subscale is 0.470～0.813.The total scale of content validity ratio(CVR) is 0.886,the average CVR value of each subscale is 0.767～1.000;in the structure validity,the coefficient correlations among subscales mostly ranged from 0.20 to 0.60,the ones between every subscale and its related total scale mostly from 0.60 to 0.80.The critical thinking skills test,the specialists judged totol effect to be fine;the bulk of resolving abilities of examination questions were more than 0.30; as a whole,the examination questions are hard, for most of which,the degree of difficulty reached 0.35~0.65; factor analysis indicated the three extracted common determiners interpretted 54.65% item's total variance,in their corresponding determiners levels,all items'loading values exceeded 0.30.The measuring and evaluating results of the critical thinking ability indicates that the average score of nursing students in critical thinking dispositions is 293.75±26.04 and the score is 59.70±12.37 in critical thinking skills.The nursing students from different classifications and grades are provided with various levels'critical thinking ability.ConclusionsThe critical thinking dispositions inventory has better reliability and validity,and the integral making process of the critical thinking skills test in principle accords with the making demands, its structure is consistent with theoretic one on the whole.The two statistical analysis results both achieved the acceptable level in statistics and psychometrics.The measuring and evaluating methods the study adopted are convenient and easy to carry out,by measuring and evaluating the nursing undergraduates,it further verified that the methods are objective,scientific and effective. Meanwhile,those prompt that we should intentionally train and develop the critical thinking ability of nursing students through some aspects,such as education belief,course installation,education goal,teaching approachs,evaluation methods and value viewpoint of the nursing speciality.Conceptions for making further investigations(1) enlarge the study scope,collect all the more reliable data,continue to study the feature of the critical thinking ability.(2) make the installation of the measuring and evaluating questionnaires more abundant and consummate (or perfect),do further reliability and validity test, and do advanced development on the tool suiting our country's conditions and being able to measure and evaluate the critical thinking ability of nursing students.