Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

5-1998

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education

Major

Education

Major Professor

Norma T. Mertz

Committee Members

Jeffery P. Aper, Mary Jane Connelly, Londa Pickthorne Fletcher

Abstract

Critical thinking, an engagement in thought requiring examining, questioning, and reflecting on ideas, has become a prominent theme at all levels of education. While there is little agreement about its precise meaning, there is considerable agreement that the concept is desirable, particularly in higher education. In the 1980s prominent educators as well as several national groups argued for an improvement in the critical thinking abilities of college students. Nursing educators and organizations have also strongly advocated that graduates of nursing programs be able to think critically.

Even without a clearly accepted definition, there has been considerable research on the effect of nursing curricula on students’ abilities to think critically. The instrument most frequently used in these studies has been the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (WGCTA). The findings from this research have been mixed, leading to conflicting and inconclusive findings. Accounting for these conflicting findings is an important area to explore.

Since the majority of studies have used the WGCTA, the conflicting findings may be due to the limitations of the designs employed to conduct the research. Thus, the purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of a longitudinal repeated measures design model with a pretest/posttest design model in assessing changes in critical thinking abilities of a cohort of baccalaureate nursing students. The research questions guiding this study were: (1) does a pretest/posttest design lead to the same conclusions about changes in total critical thinking scores as a repeated measures design? and (2) does a pretest/posttest design lead to the same conclusions about changes in component critical thinking scores as a repeated measures design?

An existing data set, consisting of WGCTA scores obtained from a cohort of baccalaureate nursing students from 1992 through 1994 who were enrolled in a public, comprehensive university in the southeast, was used to answer the research questions. This data set allowed for the comparison of a pretest/posttest design with a repeated measures design. With alpha set at 0.05, paired t-tests were used to evaluate the pretest/posttest design and repeated measures analysis of variance was used to evaluate the repeated measures design.

The analysis of the data based on a pretest/posttest design for total WGCTA scores revealed no significant differences, however, when the data were analyzed using the repeated measures design, there were significant differences. The analysis of the subtest scores revealed no significant differences with the pretest/posttest design with the exception of the subtest for recognition of assumptions which showed a significant increase. However, when the subtest scores were analyzed using the repeated measures design, significant differences were found for all the subtests with the exception of inferences, which showed no significant difference. Therefore, the answers to both of the research questions are no, the pretest/posttest design does not lead to the same conclusions as a repeated measures design for either the total WGCTA scores or the subtest scores.

The conclusion drawn from this study is that a repeated measures design provides a better method for examining critical thinking than does a simple pretest/posttest design if faculty are truly interested in determining the effect that the nursing curriculum has on the development of critical thinking abilities of students. The repeated measures design is able to show changes which occur across time that are hidden by a simple pretest/posttest design. With this full view of what is happening to critical thinking abilities as students proceed through a course of study, faculties can make informed decisions about necessary changes which need to be made to foster and facilitate this ability in their students.

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