Helping nursing students develop critical thinking skills is one of the main criteria for the evaluation of worldwide nursing education today. However, an instrument to measure critical thinking ability focus on nursing situations is lacking. The purpose of this study was to develop an instrument with acceptable validity and reliability to measure critical thinking ability in nursing process.  

Twenty nine items with 1-5 Likert scale were initially developed by literature review and focus group interview. The subjects of this study consisted of 135 nursing students at the largest nursing university in Taiwan. Four of these items with item total correlation <.3 were deleted. The remaining items were grouped into following 3 factors: 1) clarification of problem, 2) rational action, and 3) critical evaluation.

The results of this study showed that this instrument possesses acceptable expert content validity. Concurrent validity was shown by positive correlation with California Critical Thinking Disposition (r=.617, p<.01). Internal reliability was shown by Cronbach’s α .75 for total instrument and .75, .77, .76 for 3 factors accordingly.

The results of this study show that measurement of critical thinking ability in nursing process with 25 items and 3 factors has acceptable validity and reliability. Further test with more heterogeneous subjects is needed.

Key words: critical thinking ability, measurement