Critical Thinking Skills of Nursing Students

Promoting students’ critical thinking (CT) skills has been an essential goal of higher education, especially in nursing education. Unstable clinical situation requires nurses with proper ability of decision making which needs critical thinking. Accordingly this study was conducted to evaluate the critical thinking skills of nursing students of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences. It was a descriptive cross-sectional study. The sample consisted of 169 nursing students who were recruited by stratified proportion to size sampling. The Data was collected by “California Critical Thinking Skills Test B” and analyzed by spearman correlation, Pearson correlation, T test and ANOVA using SPSS-PC (v. 16). Critical thinking skills in nursing students in all three levels was less than 50 percent (%32/8) and There was no significant correlation between educational levels of students and the mean score of critical thinking skills and its subscales by ANOVA test (p>0/05). Despite the emphasis on the necessity of students’ critical thinking in higher education, the existent context does not have the required efficacy and needs some revision.