A Comparison of Nursing Student's Critical Thinking Skills and its Components

Critical thinking skills are ultimate goal of medical education and students who think critically lessen wrong judgment and conclusions concerning the theory and try to focus on topics relevant to clinical areas. This can also reduce the gap between theoretical instruction and clinical practice. Therefore, the aim of this prospective study was to compare the critical thinking skills of undergraduate nursing students at Borojen nursing faculty (n=60); data collection was performed using demographic and California critical thinking questionnaires. Then, information was analyzed by spss16 software, using descriptive and chi-square test, ANOVA and Pearson correlation coefficients. Consequently, the results pointed to the average total score of critical thinking 8/883 ± 4/075; the lowest score belonged to the second-semester students (8.166 ± 4/589), and conversely the highest score observed in the eighth-semester students (9/769 ± 3/419) which was statistically meaningful (p<0.05). In addition, deductive reasoning between subtypes of critical thinking was found at higher average (4.766±2.011).Although, critical thinking was considered as an indispensable part of the nursing profession, the results showed the weakness of this skill between nursing students. According to the lack of substantial increase in the level of critical thinking skills of senior students, therefore, this may reflect a general lack of critical thinking in educational programs.