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An important prerequisite to changes in an educational program's predominant philosophy and culture is systematic faculty development to begin and sustain the evolution. The authors describe how one nursing school implemented a faculty development program with the goal of infusing critical thinking strategies into courses throughout the curriculum.
Educating nursing students using Internet technology, in conjunction with case studies, is rewarding for both faculty and the learner The authors describe an Internet journal discussion format used as an adjunct assignment in a senior clinical nursing course. Adapting a traditional teaching strategy such as case studies proved successful online. Results showed students were able to think critically about a clinical situation and recognize the importance of peer communication.
The use of classroom debates can be helpful in teaching ethical content that is often nebulous and difficult for students to comprehend and apply. Debates enhance critical thinking skills through researching issues and developing a stance that can be supported in scientific literature. The authors describe a student debate project involving ethical issues with chronically ill clients. Many students changed their views during the debates. Students evaluated the debates as a positive learning experience.
The rising cost of college has many students seeking financial assistance. One option for helping students pay for an education is the Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC). Most educators are aware that ROTC students attend military classes and maintain physical fitness in addition to attending regular classes. However, nurse educators may not know that ROTC students receive intensive training in teamwork, leadership, and critical thinking, all extremely important skills required in professional nursing. The author describes the ROTC National Advanced Leadership Camp.
Learn how to identify and cultivate critical thinking skills of your staff.
Clinical thinking differs from scientific reasoning and educators have observed that some students have difficulty in transferring the one skill to the other. A review of the literature offers few concrete suggestions to teach this process. The author presents a technique that he has found successful with some interns who had problems with this process.
Problem-based learning has established a strong reputation within education programs delivered to a wide variety of healthcare professionals. Nevertheless, most accounts of problem-based learning relate to classroom settings, where issues of patient safety and competing demands upon time are not a primary concern. The authors explore ways in which problem-based learning may be utilized within clinical practice to enhance the professional development of nurses. A framework for thinking about problems and professional responses is outlined, and illustrations are drawn from the maternal-child health practice setting.
Because of changes in the medical environment, nurses must maintain the ability of divergent thinking to solve the health problems of patients. However, many nurses whose work in clinical practice has become routine have lost the ability of creativity. To cultivate nurses creativity should be a goal of nursing education. The purpose of this study is to evaluate a nursing concepts teaching protocol by utilizing teaching strategies directed toward creativity to promote creativity in two-year RN-BSN students. This study design is a time series and one group experiment utilizing multiple instances of treatment. Teaching strategies for creativity were applied to a teaching unit and 52 two-year RN-BSN students were tested for creativity before the end of each semester. This study was conducted from March, 1999 to May, 2000, but only 30 students completed all tests and reached a 58% return rate. Torrance s (1974) definitions of creativity includ fluency, flexibility, and uniqueness were followed and the instrument, a questionnaire on Creativity in the application of the Nursing Process Tool (CNPT), was designed based on Emerson (1988). The content validity of Chinese-version CNPT was.79. The inter-coder reliability between two researchers was.84 following a coding guide that ten nursing education experts had established. The results indicated that 30 two-year RN-BSN students had improved fluency and flexibility. The improvements reached a significant level after the third semester. Only uniqueness declined. It is suggested that nursing faculty apply teaching strategies uniqueness more often in a teaching protocol of nursing concepts. By utilizing teaching strategies of creativity in a teaching protocol of nursing concepts, it is expected that two-year RN-BSN students can acquire characteristics of creativity for problem-solving skills in clinical settings.
The purpose of this paper is to extract from current literature about play those concepts which seem to have most significance in the psychomotor development of the young child. For the purposes of this paper physical education is limited to that physical activity which occurs within the confines of a school. Very brief reference is made to play in relation to sport and the wider context of present-day culture. The concept of mastery play and stimulus seeking are examined as part of the child's growing maturity and the question is posed whether playfulness shown at an early age may be associated with a particular style of thinking in later years.
In 3 studies we investigated 3- through 6-year-olds' knowledge of thinking and feeling by examining their understanding of how emotions can change when memories of past sad events are cued by objects in the current environment. In Study 1, 48 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds were presented with 4 illustrated stories in which focal characters experience minor sad events. Later, each story character encounters a visual cue that is related to one of his or her previous sad experiences. Children were told that the character felt sad, and they were asked to explain why. Study 1 suggested considerable competence as well as substantial development in the years between 4 and 6 in the understanding of the influence of mental activity on emotions. Studies 2 and 3 more systematically explored preschoolers' understanding of cognitive cuing and emotional change with different types of situations and cues. Across these 2 studies, 108 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds listened to illustrated stories that featured story characters who each experienced a sad event and who were later exposed to a related cue. Children were not only asked to explain why the characters suddenly felt sad, but in some stories, they were also asked to predict and explain how another character, who was never at the past sad event, would feel. Results of Studies 2 and 3 showed an initial understanding of cognitive cuing and emotion in some children as young as 3, replicated and extended the evidence for significant developmental changes in that understanding during the preschool years, and revealed that the strength and consistency of preschoolers' knowledge of cognitive cuing and emotion was affected by whether cues were the same, or only similar to, parts of the earlier events.
Two experiments explored whether children's correct answers to counterfactual and future hypothetical questions were based on an understanding of possibilities. Children played a game in which a toy mouse could run down either 1 of 2 slides. Children found it difficult to mark physically both possible outcomes, compared to reporting a single hypothetical future event, "What if next time he goes the other way ..." (Experiment 1: 3-4-year-olds and 4-5-year-olds), or a single counterfactual event, "What if he had gone the other way ...?" (Experiment 2: 3-4-year-olds and 5-6-year-olds). An open counterfactual question, "Could he have gone anywhere else?," which required thinking about the counterfactual as an alternative possibility, was also relatively difficult.
Academically low-performing urban sixth graders engaged in inquiry activity received a suggestion that they focus their investigation on the role of a single factor. This suggestion had significant effects on their use of a superficially dissimilar strategy--controlling the variation of other factors. This latter strategy has received the lion's share of attention in research on the development of scientific reasoning. These results have implications, we propose, for what undergoes development with respect to scientific thinking and how this development can best be facilitated.
This experiment found that the speed of thought affects mood. Thought speed was manipulated via participants' paced reading of statements designed to induce either an elated or a depressed mood. Participants not only experienced more positive mood in response to elation than in response to depression statements, but also experienced an independent increase in positive mood when they had been thinking fast rather than slow--for both elation and depression statements. This effect of thought speed extended beyond mood to other experiences often associated with mania (i.e., feelings of power, feelings of creativity, a heightened sense of energy, and inflated self-esteem or grandiosity).
BACKGROUND: Quite often medical students or novice residents have difficulty in ruling out diseases even though they are quite unlikely and, due to this difficulty, such students and novice residents unnecessarily repeat laboratory or imaging tests. OBJECTIVE: To explore whether or not a carefully designed short training course teaching Bayesian probabilistic thinking improves the diagnostic ability of medical students. PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS: Ninety students at 2 medical schools were presented with clinical scenarios of coronary artery disease corresponding to high, low, and intermediate pretest probabilities. The students' estimates of test characteristics of exercise stress test, and pretest and posttest probability for each scenario were evaluated before and after the short course. RESULTS: The pretest probability estimates by the students, as well as their proficiency in applying Bayes's theorem, were improved in the high pretest probability scenario after the short course. However, estimates of pretest probability in the low pretest probability scenario, and their proficiency in applying Bayes's theorem in the intermediate and low pretest probability scenarios, showed essentially no improvement. CONCLUSION: A carefully designed, but traditionally administered, short course could not improve the students' abilities in estimating pretest probability in a low pretest probability setting, and subsequently students remained incompetent in ruling out disease. We need to develop educational methods that cultivate a well-balanced clinical sense to enable students to choose a suitable diagnostic strategy as needed in a clinical setting without being one-sided to the "rule-in conscious paradigm."
A multidimensional, comparative training framework is designed to integrate culture with all aspects of family therapy. Culture is viewed as occurring in multiple contexts that create common "cultural borderlands" as well as diversity; unpredictability and possibility, as well as regularity and constraint. The framework proposes a search for basic parameters to help therapists think comparatively and pluralistically about families' cultural configurations and meanings. Further, the parameters chosen--ecological context, migration/acculturation, organization, and life cycle--are used to heighten therapists' awareness about the "situated knowledge" of their own professional and personal culture. This approach recognizes the potential complexity of both the family's and the therapist's cultural location or ecological niche, and encourages curiosity in the therapeutic conversation rather than reliance on potentially stereotyping, ethnic-focused information.
PURPOSE: To compare the use of mental representations (heuristics) in diagnostic reasoning of expert (> or = 5 years' experience) and novice (< 5 years' experience) emergency nurses. METHODS: Clinical simulations were completed by a nationwide randomly selected sample of 173 experienced and 46 less-experienced emergency nurses (N = 219). FINDINGS: Experienced nurses used the heuristic, Judging by Causal Systems (diagnostic inferences deduced from systems of causal factors) significantly more did than less-experienced nurses. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: Standardized nursing diagnoses may cut short the time needed to develop representational thinking and spare cognitive reserves for reasoning needed for complex patients. Faculty need to promote student's cognitive development through strategies that promote active, reflective, and integrative learning.
With the development of cognitive models of depression, interest in identifying an enduring cognitive style characteristic of depression-prone individuals has increased. However, empirical evidence for cognitive vulnerability of this kind is as yet sparse. The paper describes the development of a Cognitions Questionnaire (CQ), designed not only to provide an overall measure of depressive cognitive style, but also to assess specific dimensions of negative thinking in relation to different types of hypothetical events. Results of a study investigating the CQ's association with depression and its capacity to detect residual cognitive vulnerability following an episode of depression are reported.
An exploratory investigation of the relationship between serum uric acid levels in male university students and their scores on tests of convergent and divergent thinking was carried out. The data suggested that uric acid levels are lower in highly divergent thinkers than in less divergent. This led to the speculation that uric acid may be an important biochemical precursor of intellectual functioning. If it does affect intellectual functioning, this may result from the action of uric acid as an endogenous cortical stimulant, or possibly from its action as a facilitator of learning.