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Nurses in advanced practice require high-level critical thinking skills. Two elements of critical thinking are discovery and justification. The process of justification is focused on argumentation skills. Using the debate process to analyze, critique, and construct arguments may be an effective teaching-learning technique. Suggestions for the use of debate in graduate nursing curricula are included.
With the focus of the National League for Nursing on therapeutic intervention, critical thinking, and communication skills, nursing programs are challenged to measure these outcomes for their BSN graduates. The authors report the use of the Critical Incident Technique to identify behavioral indicators of communication, critical thinking, and therapeutic intervention skills from first-line nursing supervisors' descriptions of exemplary nursing practice.
Although nurse educators have designed many techniques for enhancing critical-thinking skills in clinical and seminar settings, lectures also remain an integral part of nursing education. The author offers practical active learning strategies for promoting critical thinking in large classroom instruction.
Debate is presented as a valuable learning activity for teaching critical thinking and improving communication skills. Included in the discussion are a brief history of the use of debate as a teaching strategy, the responsibilities of the teacher and learner when using debate in the classroom, and its many advantages for developing competencies in communication and critical thinking.
Nursing education and practice often promote dichotomous thinking. There are serious limitations to this mode, as have been recognized by researchers in various fields. Nursing educators must overcome the entrenchment of dichotomous thinking in our teaching methods.
Are you looking for strategies to teach critical thinking? The author presents a variety of quick, creative strategies to facilitate teaching critical-thinking skills. These strategies engage students in their learning and are adaptable to any nursing course.
Attitudes, knowledge, and skills of critical thinking are developed in a role-playing simulation. Using diabetes mellitus, students solve lifelike problems within the role-playing experience, develop sensitivity and awareness of another's life experience with illness, and generate empathy toward persons with diabetes. Critical thinking is demonstrated in student's double-entry journals.
Achieving effective transfer of theoretical knowledge to clinical practice requires knowledge of thinking paradigms in relation to specific nursing content. It is a challenge to develop instructional designs for teaching and assessing implicit thought processes involved in clinical reasoning. The authors demonstrate the use of the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy to teach thinking skills involved in diagnostic reasoning in a clinical laboratory.
The ability to think critically, improve clinical systems, and decrease errors in clinical judgments are ever the vision of nursing practice. The author describes the thinking processes of nursing students as they make clinical judgments and the most important teaching/learning strategies that help develop their clinical judgment.
Accrediting and specialty organizations agree that a master's education expands critical thinking skills gained during undergraduate study, yet a review of literature revealed a lack of research measuring critical thinking of students enrolled in postbaccalaureate education in nursing and other fields. Of 35 studies retrieved, 17 were conducted on undergraduate nursing students, with the remainder spread across practicing RNs, and master's level students in physical therapy, business, medicine, and nursing. A critique of this research and recommendations for future study are presented.
Faculty in a medical-surgical nursing course developed learning outcomes to foster critical thinking skills involved in clinical reasoning. To facilitate students' abilities to make effective clinical judgments, direct teaching of thinking skills was incorporated into nursing content instruction. This instructional design challenged faculty to develop test items that would permit direct observation of students' thought processes. The author describes how context-dependent item sets were developed to meet this evaluation need.
Two studies assessed the development of children's understanding that thoughts and feelings are closely interlinked. These studies showed that, unlike 8-year-olds and adults, 5-year-olds seldom explained a sudden change in emotion that had no apparent external cause by appeal to the occurrence of a thought. They also tended not to recognize that a person who is feeling sad is probably also thinking sad thoughts, or that people may be able to make themselves feel happy just by thinking of something happy. These results are consistent with evidence that young children tend to be unaware of the stream of consciousness and have poor introspective skills. A possible developmental sequence leading to an understanding of these thought-feeling links is proposed.
Do participants in the Deese, Roediger, and McDermott (DRM) procedure demonstrate false memory because they think of nonpresented critical words during study and confuse them with words that were actually presented? In two experiments, 160 participants studied eight visually presented DRM lists at a rate of 2 s or 5 s per word. Half of the participants rehearsed silently: the other half rehearsed overtly. Following study, the participants' memory for the lists was tested by recall or recognition. Typical false memory results were obtained for both memory measures. More important, two new results were observed. First, a large majority of the overt-rehearsal participants spontaneously rehearsed approximately half of the critical words during study. Second, critical-word rehearsal at study enhanced subsequent false recall, but it had no effect on false recognition or remember judgments for falsely recognized critical words. Thinking of critical words during study was unnecessary for producing false memory.
This study investigated the role of negative thinking as a potential mediator of performance deficits under stereotype threat. After being assigned to a stereotype-threat or a no-threat condition, 60 female participants were asked to complete a difficult math task. Using the thought-listing technique, women under stereotype threat reported a higher number of negative thoughts specifically related to the test and to mathematics compared with women in the no-threat condition. Moreover, women under stereotype threat also showed a sharp decrease in performance that (a) was most pronounced in the second half of the test and (b) was mediated by the increase in negative thinking.
We treated 2 patients with obsessive-compulsive disorders for years using messages, and their symptoms had improved. We provided the messages that utterly disproved the core reason of their fears, and suggested the patients to repeat, listen or read these messages whenever the obsessive thinking occurred. We supposed that the therapeutic intervention we proposed here have the following benefits: 1. This could dispel the patients' fears and correct the contents of obsessive thinking. 2. This could avoid involving others around and remove the disadvantages following the involvement. We discussed the mechanism of this intervention on the basis of the learning theory.
Cortical activity in the human electroencephalogram alpha band was measured (by means of an event-related approach) in a pre- and a post-test (with intermediate training) while participants (n = 30) were confronted with divergent thinking tasks. Half of the participants received a divergent thinking training (over a time period of 2 weeks) which was composed of exercises structurally similar to those used in the pre- and post-test. Analyses revealed that the training group displayed higher task-related synchronization of frontal alpha activity (i.e. increases in alpha power from the pre-stimulus reference to the activation interval) than the control group. These findings are in line with the view of frontal alpha synchronization as a selective top-down inhibition process that prevents internal or top-down information processing being disturbed by incoming external input.
Synchronicity blurs the boundaries of psyche and physis. This invisible dance of mind and matter suggested to Jung an interconnection between physical and mental events reflecting a unified 'psychophysical space-time continuum'. His idea of exteriorization put forth the notion that unconscious thoughts can manifest themselves in the external world. I have related this to Bion's theory of thinking, where thoughts, which should be a prelude to action, become actions in themselves, projections of unthought thoughts. Through detailed clinical work with dreams I will explore the effects of early trauma on the development of the capacity to think, and the way in which synchronistic events relate to projections of early traumatic experiences which have not been 'mentalized'.
Seizures associated with toothbrushing have been reported in patients with precentral or postcentral partial epilepsy. Seizures precipitated by thinking have been described in patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsy. We report a patient with intractable partial epilepsy in which seizures were induced both by toothbrushing, and by seeing or thinking about toothbrush and toothpaste. Video-EEG analysis revealed a left temporal lobe origin for these reflex seizures. We discuss how complex multimodal stimuli may trigger these reflex seizures.