Does writing patient care daily effects on critical thinking? A pilot study with 1st year nursing students

Abstract

Writing is a powerful way of learning. Writing may provide students with opportunities to think by discussion and use higher-level thinking skills to answer complicated problems. The purpose of this study is to understand whether keeping written patient care logs has an effect on improving the critical thinking skills of nursing students. This study used a quasi-experimental, pretest-posttest design. The sample of the study consisted of 69 students who were registered for the course Fundamentals of Nursing, agreed to participate in the study and filled out the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory (CCTDI) completely. The study was conducted with students who were participating in clinical practice of the 1st-year course Fundamentals of Nursing in the spring semester of the academic year of 2016-2017. The pretest was carried out on the first day of clinical practice by applying a questionnaire form and the CCTDI with the students. Throughout the clinical practice, the students kept written logs at the end of each day of practice. The posttest was carried out on the last day of clinical practice by applying the CCTDI with the students. Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to compare the results of the pretest and the posttest. The mean pretest critical thinking disposition score of the students was found as 214.71 ± 20.17, while their mean score in the posttest was found as 219.13 ± 23.96. The difference between the mean pretest and posttest critical thinking disposition scores was statistically significant. As a result of this study, it was found that the mean critical thinking scores of the students were not on a desired level but keeping written patient care logs affected the improvement of their critical thinking skills positively.