Reliability of assessment of critical thinking

Although clinical critical thinking skills and behaviors are among the most highly sought characteristics of BSN graduates, they remain among the most difficult to teach and assess. Three reasons for this difficulty have been (1) lack of agreement among nurse educators as to the definition of critical thinking, (2) low correlation between clinical critical thinking and existing standardized tests of critical thinking, and (3) poor reliability in scoring other evidences of critical thinking, such as essays. This article first describes a procedure for teaching critical thinking that is based on a consensus definition of 17 dimensions of critical thinking in clinical nursing practice. This procedure is easily taught to nurse educators and can be flexibly and inexpensively incorporated into any undergraduate nursing curriculum. We then show that students' understanding and use of these dimensions can be assessed with high reliability (coefficient a between 0.7 and 0.8) and with great time efficiency for both teachers and students. By using this procedure iteratively across semesters, students can develop portfolios demonstrating attainment of competence in clinical critical thinking, and educators can obtain important summary evaluations of the degree to which their graduates have succeeded in this important area of their education.