Nurse Critical Thinking Critical Thinking and Other

Nurse Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking and Other Intellectual Skills: Documented Benefits and Skill Application in Nursing

There are many academic skills that are necessary for nursing students that also serve nurses well in professional practice. This paper will examine three such academic skills both in their general benefits to learners and professionals in all sectors and personally to my own advances in nursing knowledge and practice. Active reading, effective writing, and critical thinking skills are essential tools for helping one to properly take in, analyze, and communicate information in efficient and effective manners, and each of these individual thinking areas benefits the other two, as well. There are certain challenges that one might be face with in acquiring these skills, and I will detail my own personal challenges below following a general investigation of benefits and prior to a discussion of my application of these skills.

Benefits

Psychologist Benjamin Bloom developed a taxonomy of learning that identified simple knowledge -- the ability to recall facts, essentially -- as the lowest intellectual achievement, and evaluation -- the ability to compare, argue, defend, and estimate based on knowledge -- as the highest (OfficePort 2010). Active reading, effective writing, and critical thinking skills help to move from lower levels of intellectual achievement to higher. Active reading skills such as questioning both the content and the context of a piece of text leads to more engagement with the material and a better understanding of forces involved in a given situation (UNSW 2010).

The benefits of effective writing skills are equally clear. Simple steps like clearly defining goals for each piece and each section of a writing task helps to provide a strong focus to anyone's writing, and the more efficient and effective communication that this affords has both intrinsic benefits in any setting as well as (very often) extrinsic benefits due to increased positive recognition in professional settings (Braverman 2010). Both active reading and effective writing skills could also be considered a part of the general domain of critical thinking skills, which apply reasoning and skill to information in order to guide values and actions (FCT 2009). True critical thinking also allows for an openness to all possibly relevant information, accounting for all factors in a situation and not taking anything for granted, and the closer one can come to this ideal the more effective their decisions will be (FCT 2009).

Challenges

The enormous benefits that are the result of active reading, effective writing, and critical thinking far outweigh the challenges that exist in developing these skills, but this does not mean these challenges are irrelevant. I faced several challenges in the development of my own active reading skills, and still find certain texts challenging due to the dryness and purely fact-based nature that does not at first admit of any speculation. I have found the techniques of frequently reviewing information and trying to predict future revelations not only helpful in maintaining a necessary level of engagement with texts with which I am struggling, but this also helps to improve my overall critical thinking abilities (TUSD 2010).

Writing is the area where my challenges have been the greatest. Maintaining focus in reading is one thing, but developing my own ideas in a clear and effective manner in which I was able to write them down was something else altogether. One of the effective tricks that I learned in finding a way to begin focusing my writing is to look at quotations related to the subject that I am trying to write about. Whether or not any quotations are actually used to introduce the piece, utterances and lines of text are usually remembered when they are concise and direct -- when they are effective, in other words (Ross-Larson 1999). They can thus provide inspiration for focusing other related writing. Enabling myself to think critically about every decision and issue I am confronted with has also been a major challenge, but it is one that have been happy to accept; simply dedicating myself to finding questions in everything I learn and observe has greatly enhanced my appreciation and my abilities in this area.

Applications

Applying effective reading skills to nursing practice occurs in both research and clinical settings. It is greatly assisted by developing a questioning attitude toward all texts that are encountered in the study and practice of nursing, with specific questions developed in every specific scenario so that the desired information rather than peripheral details is obtained from the readings (Greenall & Swan 1986). This explicit questioning while reading also improves engagement with the text and overall understandings of the subjects studied (Greenall & Swan 1986). Questioning medical charts and records is also a necessary element of effective nursing practice.