Teaching and Learning Activities That Promote Critical Thinking in Student Nurse Practitioners: A Rapid Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Critical thinking has been identified as a key requirement for safe and competent practice for Nurse Practitioners. It has been suggested that it is the foundation for the development of clinical reasoning, diagnostic reasoning, and clinical judgement. Poorly developed critical thinking is linked to negative patient outcomes, diagnostic error, cognitive bias, and poor information processing. There is little literature that studies the teaching and learning activities that can be used in the development of critical thinking in Nurse Practitioners. The aim of this rapid review was to identify teaching and learning activities that promote critical thinking in Nurse Practitioners. DESIGN AND METHOD: A rapid review was conducted to identify studies that examined different teaching and learning activities that promoted the development of critical thinking or any of its subthemes such as clinical reasoning, diagnostic reasoning or clinical judgement. Four databases were systematically searched: CINAHL, Medline, Embase and ERIC. The methodology used was guided by the Cochrane Rapid Review Methods Group. Eligible papers included peer-reviewed publications that evaluated the efficacy or effectiveness of teaching or learning strategies used for the development or promotion of critical thinking or its components. The included populations were faculty teaching in a Nurse Practitioner programme, Nurse Practitioners, Nurse Practitioner students or graduate level nursing students. RESULTS: The search yielded 6421 article titles and abstracts. Of these, 12 were included in the final rapid review. Teaching and learning activities were divided into three themes: classroom, simulation, and written. Classroom activities included problem-based learning, unfolding case scenarios, self-explanation, and Socratic inquiry. Simulation was in the form of high fidelity using standardised patients, computer-based programmes, escape rooms and virtual reality. Written activities included concept mapping, evolving case studies and illness scripts. Study participants noted that using a combination of teaching and learning activities had the greatest impact on their development of critical thinking. CONCLUSION: There is limited knowledge on the effects of teaching and learning strategies on the development of critical thinking in nurse practitioners. This review offers a perspective on strategies that were most impactful for student nurse practitioners in their development of the different aspects of critical thinking. Simulation activities were the most researched and using it in combination with other activities was preferred by study participants. PATIENT OR PUBLIC CONTRIBUTION: No patient or public contribution as this is a literature review.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.062 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.022 | 0.019 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".