Abstract
Amid escalating concerns regarding nurses’ capabilities, nursing education curricula do not satisfactorily prepare nursing students for the workplace challenges they encounter following completion of the programme. Instruction and appraisal of critical thinking in the contemporary academic setting and curricula are deficient.
The purpose of this study was to implement and appraise a programme to facilitate critical thinking of senior nursing students at a higher education institution in Gauteng. As such, the researcher evaluated the nursing students’ critical thinking aptitudes, and formulated recommendations on how nurse educators can better facilitate critical thinking.
The design that was employed in this study was a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design. The composition of the sample was third-year nursing students (n=32) registered for the R174 programme at a higher education institution in Gauteng Province.
The researcher used a scoring rubric, the Holistic Critical Thinking Scoring Rubric (HCTSR), to collect the data (Annexure H). A total of 32 rubrics was completed during commencement of the study, and 32 rubrics for post-testing following the implementation of the programme. All 64 rubrics, 32 for pre-testing and 32 for post-testing respectively, were found to be valid, and the participant compliance rate between pre- and post-testing was 100%.
The results showed that the programme was effective in facilitating critical thinking. There was a statistically significant improvement in five of the six critical thinking domains. Moderate to strong relationships were found between these domains. A moderate effect was found in support of the alternative hypothesis, thereby warranting rejection. The study therefore confirmed that the implementation of a programme to facilitate critical thinking can be a valuable tool in nursing education.
Keywords: implementation; evaluation; critical Thinking; programme; higher education institution.