Nursing and health care perspectives
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Nurs Health Care Perspect · Nov 2001
Perceived barriers to teaching for critical thinking by BSN nursing faculty.
The ability to think critically is considered an essential skill of nursing graduates and competent nursing practice. Yet, the literature reports that teachers are having difficulty teaching for critical thinking and that critical thinking is lacking in new nursing graduates. ⋯ Students' attitudes and expectations represented the single greatest barrier to the implementation of critical thinking teaching strategies, followed by time constraints and the perceived need to teach for content coverage. Recommendations to support and encourage faculty to teach for critical thinking are outlined.
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Nurs Health Care Perspect · Sep 1999
Thinking in nursing education. Part II. A teacher's experience.
Across academia, educators are investigating teaching strategies that facilitate students' abilities to think critically. Because may these strategies require low teacher-student ratios or sustained involvement over time, efforts to implement them are often constrained by diminishing resources for education, faculty reductions, and increasing number of part-time teachers and students. In nursing, the challenges of teaching and learning critical thinking are compounded by the demands of providing care to patients with increasingly acute and complex problems in a wide variety of settings. ⋯ In addition, teachers are often not able to accompany each student to the clinical site. Thus, the traditional strategies for teaching and learning critical thinking common to hospital-based clinical courses are being challenged, transformed, and extended (5). Part II of this article describes findings that suggest how many teachers and students are challenging the conventional approaches to schooling and creating pedagogies that are more responsive to the contemporary context of health care.
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Nurs Health Care Perspect · Sep 1999
Thinking in nursing education. Part I. A student's experience learning to think.
Learning to think critically is a central commitment of nursing education. There is a substantial body of literature describing nursing educators' attempts to define critical thinking (1-3) to differentiate critical thinking from other kinds of thinking (1,4), and to measure students' ability (and changes in ability) to think critically (2,5-7). These efforts were facilitated when the National League for Nursing Accrediting Commission (NLNAC) identified critical thinking as an outcome criterion for the accrediation of undergraduate and graduate nursing programs. ⋯ This two-year study, which was undertaken to reveal common contemporary approaches to teaching and learning critical thinking in clinical courses, analyzes the lived experiences of 45 students and teachers. Part I describes a typical student's experiences of learning "nurse thinking" in the context of clinical practice. Part II describes a typical teacher's experiences creating opportunities for students to learn and practice critical thinking in a community clinical course.
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In the 1960s, the concept of saving lives through the use of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) was a revolutionary idea. In the 1990s, CPR is a household word, and CPR classes are taught to both medical and nonmedical groups. The layperson is a critical link in the chain of survival for cardiac arrests (1). ⋯ Studies have revealed that bystanders trained in CPR often fail to recognize emergencies and typically delay the initiation of CPR when emergencies are present. A change in the approach to CPR instruction is needed. CPR instructors are encouraged to develop innovative teaching strategies that enhance learning and meet the goal of community CPR training.