Developing and Piloting a Critical Thinking Rubric to Evaluate Written Nursing Care Plans in an Associate Degree Nursing Program

Thesis (M.Nurs.), College of Nursing, Washington State UniversityCritical thinking has long been considered an essential feature of competent nursing practice. This requirement challenges those teaching nursing to find a way to measure this essential element. The National League of Nursing Accrediting Commission (NLN-AC) states that one of the essential program outcomes for nursing programs is that their graduates demonstrate critical thinking (2003). With this mandate in mind, it is important for educators to develop ways of measuring critical thinking in their nursing students. This project was designed to develop a tool that could be used to measure critical thinking in A.D.N. (associate degree of nursing) students' written care plans. A rubric was developed using Scheffer and Rubenfeld's (2000) seventeen consensus dimensions of critical thinking in nursing practice. This includes ten habits of mind and seven cognitive skills that a critically thinking nurse incorporates into her daily practice. Once the rubric was developed, a group of nine faculty from a small community college in southeastern Washington piloted it by applying it to three different nursing care plans that were randomly selected from a group of twenty possible recent submissions. Findings demonstrated that there was high agreement between raters, and faculty were able to clearly differentiate Habits of Mind from Cognitive Skills, but they were not able to clearly differentiate between individual concepts. Suggestions for further refinement of the Critical Thinking Rubric include: (a) providing education to enhance a deeper understanding of Habits of Mind and Cognitive Skills, (b) changing the scale on the evaluation tool to allow for a wider choice of responses, and (c) selecting a larger number and a wider variety of student work samples to further enhance reliability and validity of the rubric