Nursing Students Critical Thinking and Research Utilization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: In the nursing profession critical thinking (CT) has increasingly been the focus of investigation for the past several years. CT dispositions and skills are valuable in nursing practice. Nurses need complex thinking skills to effectively manage the fast-paced and constantly changing health care environments in which they work. CT is also vital in developing evidence-based nursing practice. Nurses who are disposed to think critically are more likely to critically interpret the available evidence, and able to make high quality judgments and draw valid inferences. Currently, no published studies could be located that specifically examined the relationship between Critical Thinking Dispositions CTDs) and research utilization (RU) of undergraduate nursing students. Aim: The aim of the study was to investigate the critical thinking dispositions (CTDs) and Research Utilization (RU) of undergraduate nursing students enrolled in a baccalaureate program at a university in Western Canada. Methods: The study used a sequential mixed method approach. In this paper only quantitative analysis will be reported. A convenient sample of 181 students from a 4 year BScN program for high school graduates, and a 24 months after degree BScN program for individuals admitted with a degree in another discipline completed a background/demographic questionnaire, the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory and a modified (shortened) Research Utilization Survey form developed by Estabrooks (1997). Results: The majority of participants (69%) scored below the target score of 280 on the California Critical Thinking Dispositions Inventory. This indicates an overall deficiency in critical thinking dispositions (CTDs). However, participants scored high on overall RU (mean = 3.4/5). Overall critical thinking dispositions were not statistically significantly correlated with all forms of research utilization, with the exception of persuasive research utilization. Conclusions: Approximately 30% of the students in the current study had adequate levels of CTDs. Results indicate a need for students’ continued development in these areas. Dispositions are crucial to critical thinking; without them CT and RU does not happen or may be substandard.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".