Paper
Saturday, 22 July 2006
This presentation is part of : Analysis and Studies of Nursing Education
An Analysis of Critical Thinking Abilities in Competent and Expert Nurses
Kathleen Bobay, PhD, APRN, BC, College of Nursing, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA
Learning Objective #1: describe how clinical nursing expertise is measured at one healthcare system.
Learning Objective #2: discuss advantages and disadvantages of four commonly used critical thinking tools in nursing education.
     We often hear that expert nurses must have better critical thinking skills than competent nurses.  However, the nursing literature has not supported this relationship consistently.  One difficulty may lie in the critical thinking tools which are most frequently used in nursing education research.  Additionally, there are few reliable methods for determining nursing expertise.  Consequently, nurse researchers often rely on years of nursing experience as the measure.     This study explored whether there are measurable differences between competent and expert clinical nurses who completed four commonly used critical thinking tools:  the California Critical Thinking Skills Test, the California Critical Thinking Dispositions Inventory, the Cornell Critical Thinking Test – version Z, and the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal.  Nurses were recruited from a large Midwestern US healthcare system which has a long-standing professional practice model (12 years) based on Benner’s (1984) novice-to-expert continuum.     No statistically significant differences were found when comparing competent and expert nurses using any of the four critical thinking tools.  There were also no statistically significant differences between any of the tools and education level.  Expert nurses did have significantly more years of experience than competent nurses and were more likely to be nationally certified.     Consideration for how critical thinking tools are used to measure nursing education program outcomes is necessary.  More sensitive measures are needed to quantify differences among levels of clinical nursing expertise.

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