Thinking About Critical Thinking

Nurse educators have become increasingly concerned about the development of skill in critical thinking. Not coincidentally, the new criteria for evaluation of Baccalaureate and Higher Degree Programs explicitly include critical thinking as one of the "required" outcomes of nursing education - "the students' skiïls in reasoning, analysis, research or decision-making relevant to the discipline of nursing" (NLN, 1992, p.26). It is apparent in this forward-looking document that emphasis on content-coverage is a thing of the past, and that we must attend to how we define critical thinking, what educational methods support its development, and how we can assure that students have achieved some acceptable level of skill.

It's little wonder that we may feel overwhelmed by the task. In the April 1991 issue of the Journal, KintgenAndrews summarized the somewhat perplexing literature on critical thinking and clinical judgment in nursing. According to her review, nursing education apparently has little impact on "generic" critical thinking, but does improve skill in clinical judgment. Moreover, KintgenAndrews points out that there is virtually no evidence of a relationship between measures of critical thinking and clinical judgment. This consistent finding of no relationship suggests some conceptual problems in our longstanding assumption that critical thinking can be operationalized in nursing as clinical judgment - problemsolving, decision-making, nursing process.

This issue of the Journal offers some help...