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The purpose of this article is to describe a study that implemented concept maps as a methodology to teach and evaluate critical thinking. Students in six senior clinical groups were taught to use concept maps. Students created three concept maps over the course of the semester. Date analysis demonstrated a group mean score of 40.38 on the first concept map and 135.55 on the final concept map, for a difference of 98.16. The paired t value comparing the first concept map to the final concept map was -5.69. The date indicated a statistically significant difference between the first and final maps. This difference is indicative of the students' increase in conceptual and critical thinking.
I tell you one thing, if you leam it by yourself, if you have to get down and dig for it, it never leaves you. It stays there as long as you live because you had to dig it out of the mud before you learned what it was (Wigginton, 19S5, prologue).
-Aunt Addie Norton
In the preceding quote, Addie Norton refers to a special type of learning. This type of learning ia defined as one that requires an active process of thinking, learning, and drawing relationships. The questions nurse educators face are: Do we teach students to think and learn in this fashion? Do we help students develop the critical-thinking skills that will facilitate a lifelong ability to "dig it out of the mud?'
The purpose of this article is to describe a study that implemented concept maps as a methodology to teach and evaluate critical thinking. As nursing education has shifted to an emphasis on outcomes-oriented education, the issue of teaching and evaluating critical thinking has come to the forefront. The National League for Nursing (NLN) now requires the demonstration of critical thinking in graduates of all nursing programs in the United States (NLN, 1996).
One of the major issues in the teaching and evaluation of critical thinking is the development and use of tools and instruments that both foster the teaching, as well as the measurement, of critical thinking, specific to the context in which learning occurs. Instruments exist that measure general aspects of critical thinking (e.g., California Critical Thinking Skills Test [Pacione, 19921; Watson-Glaser Critical...