UTMB WORK SCHOOL PROGRAMS

UTMB WORK SCHOOL PROGRAMS

Creating Educational Opportunities for Employees

Critical Thinking

An important part of being a nurse or anyone in a medical setting is to be able to use good decision making. You are required to know more than the facts and memorizing facts will not help you pass Boards and become a nurse. It is vital that you recall the facts but also be able to use information to make timely decisions. Therefore, nursing tests not only test your ability to recall facts, but also your ability to think critically and analyze a situation. Critical thinking is a skill. It is a skill you can learn and practice.

Reflection and self-monitoring are tools to assist you in developing skills. Experienced nurses also rely on intuition. Intuition is grounded in knowledge and experience and is involved in making nursing judgments. Some people are naturals at critical thinking. Others have to work to develop the skill.

There are a number of books and websites that can give you practice and tips on critical thinking:

Soar To Success Do Your Best on Nursing Tests!, Rollant, Paulette D., Mosby, Inc., 1999.

Application of Nursing Process and Nursing Diagnosis An Interactive Text for Diagnostic Reasoning, Doenges, Marilynn E., Moorhouse, Mary Frances and Burley, Joseph T., F. A. Davis Company, 1995.

Thinking Critically: A Tutorial by Joel Rudinow and Michael Donovan, Santa Rosa Junior College

Logic Tutor
"is a web-based tutorial program which provides more than 1,100 exercises and summaries on every major concept in The Art of Reasoning."