<p> One of the challenges in nursing education is the need to enable students to internalize the skills needed to implement the thought processes of critical thinking and clinical reasoning. The research of Patricia Benner has been instrumental in explaining the need to improve the critical thinking and clinical reasoning skills of newly licensed registered nurses. Dr. Benner’s research has changed the focus of nursing to include these skills in the education process. The study was designed to evaluate the efficacy of a classroom educational method designed to help students improve these skills. The ex post facto study was conducted at one Southern community college with students enrolled in an Associate Degree nursing program. The study used the nursing educational theory of Patricia Benner and the general educational theory of constructivist educational theory as a theoretical base. Archived data was collected from the results of two cohorts of nursing students based on their performance on two separate administrations of the Assessment Technologies Institute (ATI) critical thinking examination. The data was analyzed using central tendency statistics and an independent samples <i>t</i>-test. Analysis of the data indicate that the educational implementation was effective in increasing the skills needed for clinical reasoning as evaluated by the ATI critical thinking examination. The cohort that used the Critical Thinking Teaching Method (CRTM) increased their scores by 5.62 percent while the cohort that did not use the CRTM scores remained relatively static</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:10165983 |
| Date | 03 December 2016 |
| Creators | Booher, Cynthia D. |
| Publisher | University of Phoenix |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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