DOI: 10.5176/2315-4330_WNC15.105
Authors: Agnes Makhene and Mary M. Chabeli
Abstract:
Caring is a difficult nursing activity that involves a complex nature of a human being in need of decision-making and problem solving through the critical thinking process. It is mandatory that critical thinking is facilitated in nursing education in order to render care in diverse multicultural care settings. The purpose of the paper is to describe a conceptual framework to facilitate critical thinking in nursing education. The researcher departed deductively from the consensus definition resulting from a concept analysis of critical thinking by exponents who defined critical thinking as a purposeful, self-regulatory judgement which results into interpretation, analysis, evaluation and inference including explanation of the critical thinking process of evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological and contextual considerations on which the judgment is based (Facione 1990:2-14). The design of the study was a qualitative, explorative and descriptive design for conceptual framework development that is contextual in nature (Burns &Grove 2009; 45, 237; Mouton 2009: 103). The empirical phase included focus group interviews of a purposive sample of nurse educators on how to use the critical thinking framework to facilitate critical thinking using the critical thinking framework which consists of contextual, conceptual, methodological dimension that included the use of reflection, Socratic questioning, reasoning, argumentation and cooperative/collaborative learning as methods used to facilitate critical thinking, evidential and criteriological dimensions. A non-probability purposive sample of nurse educators was drawn from a population of educators in an Institution of Higher Education (Burns & Grove, 2009: 355). Data was collected through the use of a focus group interview (Krueger, 2009: 6). Miles and Huberman’s (1994: 10-12) qualitative data analysis method was used to analyse data. Lincoln and Guba’s principles of trustworthiness were employed to ensure trustworthiness and McQuoid-Mason and Dhai (2013) ethical principles were used. The findings led to the development of a conceptual framework of how to facilitate critical thinking in nursing education
Keywords: Critical thinking, contextualconceptual, methodological, evidential, criteriological dimensionsI.
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