An experimental approach in evaluating instructional strategies to teach critical thinking to freshman nursing students

Critical thinking is fast becoming one of the major focuses of all nursing curriculum (Miller & Malcolm, 1990). The new criteria for evaluation of baccalaureate and higher degree programs developed by the National League for Nursing includes critical thinking as a required outcome for nursing education. As medicine and nursing continue to increase in complexity, nursing educational programs will need to prepare students to meet these changes.;A class of seventy-six freshman nursing students was randomly placed in four groups. These groups of students were enrolled in their last freshman nursing course at the time of the study. The setting for this study was a non-traditional hospital-affiliated registered nurse (RN) diploma program. The sample population consisted of a heterogeneous group of students in relation to age, experience, ethnic and racial background, and gender.;The design of this research study was a pretest/posttest control-group design. All students received the California Critical Thinking Skills Test as their pretest/posttest tool. The pretest was administered to all student participants during the orientation in the first week of the Fall 1995 semester.;The researcher taught three lecture/discussion classes. Teaching strategies utilized within the classroom included case studies, large group discussion, small group interaction, role playing and questioning. Additionally, all students were required to complete an assigned computer-assisted instruction program. The posttest was administered to all study participants in the tenth week of the eleven week semester.;The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of various instructional strategies on developing critical thinking abilities in freshman nursing students. The hypothesis for this study was: Improvement between the pre and posttest scores in the California Critical Thinking Skills Test will occur with a sample of freshman nursing students enrolled in a first level professional nursing course who are exposed to multiple methods of analytical and critical thinking.;At the completion of the research, sixty-nine students completed the entire study. An analysis of covariance was performed on the posttest total score of all groups utilizing the pretest score as the covariate. Similar testing was performed on the five sub-scale scores within the California Critical Thinking Skills Test. These sub-scales included the Delphi sub-scales of analysis.