A study on the Nursing and Midwifery Students' Trend to Critical Thinking and its Relation with their Educational Status

Nowadays critical thinking is a necessity. This way of thinking is needed in nursing occupation, and therefore, in order for the present- and the would-be-nurses to be skillful and qualified for their jobs, it is vital to develop critical thinking. Here, we aim to study the tendency of the nursing and midwifery students towards critical thinking and its relationship with their educational status.

Methods and Materials: This research is a descriptive correlational study conducted on eighty one students of Torbat-e-Heydarieh Nursing and Midwifery College by the convenience sampling method a questionnaire was used to collect the data. The researcher studied and analyzed the collected data by means of SPSS - a statistical computer software - along with the One-way ANaYA, the Pearson correlation coefficient, the T-student and the General linear model.

Results: This study showed that there was a significant difference between the average scores of the students' trend to critical thinking and their different semesters. Moreover, there was a negative reading on the co-relation of obtained scores and the students' ages. However, no significant relation was seen between the students' trend to critical thinking and their average scores of previous semesters or even of their (high school) diploma.

Conclusion: The findings of this study suggest that not enough importance has been given to critical thinking as a basic aspect of nurse training by our educational system. So, it is important that this need is addressed by improving our present instruction models.