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ABSTRACT
The purpose of this study was to define critical thinking in nursing. A Delphi technique with 5 rounds of input was used to achieve this purpose. An international panel of expert nurses from nine countries: Brazil, Canada, England, Iceland, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Thailand, and 23 states in the U.S. participated in this study between 1995 and 1998. A consensus definition (statement) of critical thinking in nursing was achieved. The panel also identified and defined 10 habits of the mind (affective components) and 7 skills (cognitive components) of critical thinking in nursing. The habits of the mind of critical thinking in nursing included: confidence, contextual perspective, creativity, flexibility, inquisiti veness, intellectual integrity, intuition, open-mindedness, perseverance, and reflection. Skills of critical thinking in nursing included: analyzing, applying standards, discriminating, information seeking, logical reasoning, predicting and transforming knowledge. These findings can be used by practitioners, educators and researchers to advance understanding of the essential role of critical thinking in nursing.
Critical thinking (CT) has been a much-debated subject over the last decade. The U.S. Department of Education, the National League for Nursing (NLN), and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) have formally acknowledged the importance of CT in undergraduate education (Department of Education National Educational Goals 2000 Panel, 1992; National League for Nursing, 1992; American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 1998). Yet, there is little consensus on the meaning and application of CT in nursing. The purpose of this study was to achieve consensus on critical thinking in nursing from an international panel of nursing experts in education, practice, and research.
Some believe that CT is a universal phenomenon common across all disciplines; others believe that some aspects of CT must be discipline-specific (McKeachie, Pintrich, Lin, Smith & Sharma, 1990). According to Beyer (1987), "The term critical thinking is one of the most abused terms in our thinking skills vocabulary. Generally it means whatever its users stipulate it to mean" (p. 32). A decade later, Valiga and Bruderle (1994) continued to address concerns about multiple interpretations of CT among nursing faculty and the difficulties this caused as they communicated with students. "In essence faculty may use similar words but mean different things" (p. 118). Multiple definitions of CT have resulted in confusion and misinterpretations...