Design and Psychometrics of Critical Thinking Skills Questionnaire for Nursing Postgraduate Students

Nursing is based on critical thinking. In nursing, practical and clinical training in critical thinking is integrated with each other. What parallels the teaching of critical thinking is the discussion of measuring critical thinking. The aim of this study was to construct and standardize the critical thinking skills test in postgraduate nursing students.

This is methodological research that lasted from 1398 to 1400. The 200 participants included master's and Ph.D. students in nursing at Golestan-Gorgan and Fars-Shiraz universities of medical sciences. After constructing the questionnaire items based on a qualitative study, the face and content validity of the tool were determined. The validity of the instrument constructs was evaluated using exploratory factor analysis and its reliability was assessed using Cronbach's alpha and the stability of the instrument was assessed by a test-retest method. Findings were analyzed using SPSS 18 software.

The mean and standard deviation age of participants was 35±6 years. 55.5% of the participants were women. The results of exploratory factor analysis showed the adequacy of the samples for data analysis with a score of 0.917 based on the KMO test and led to the development of three factors, which were: knowledge with 12 items, attitude with 12 items, and skill with 12 items. The reliability of internal consistency was measured by Cronbach's alpha method for the whole questionnaire (α = 0.952). The mean and standard deviation of the total score of critical thinking skills in postgraduate nursing students was 95.95±24.26.

The findings of this study show that the 36-item critical thinking skills questionnaire has good validity and reliability and can be used to assess nursing students' critical thinking skills.