Strategies to overcome obstacles in the facilitation of critical thinking in nursing education

This paper seeks to describe strategies that can be used to overcome obstacles in the facilitation of critical thinking in nursing education. A qualitative, explorative, descriptive and contextual design was used to conduct the research in which fourth year basic comprehensive students and nurse educators volunteered to take part in the study by signing an informed consent. The participants were purposively selected. Focus group interviews were used to collect data from both groups. Tesch's descriptive method of open coding described in Creswell (1994) (Creswell, J. 1994. Research design: Qualitative and quantitative approach. Sage, London.) was used to analyse data. DENOSA's (1998) (Democratic Nursing Organisation of South Africa, 1998. Ethical standards for nurse researchers. Denosa, Pretoria) ethical standards for research were observed to maintain the standard and quality of the research. Guba's (1985) (Lincoln, Y.S., Guba, E.G. 1985. Naturalistic inquiry. Sage, London.) framework was used to ensure trustworthiness of the study. The following obstacles were identified and recontextualised within the existing literature to be able to describe the strategies to overcome the identified obstacles to the facilitation of critical thinking of students: the educators' tack of knowledge; use of teaching and assessment methods that do not facilitate critical thinking of learners; the negative attitudes of educators and their resistance to change; inappropriate selection process and poor educational background that did not facilitate critical thinking of students; inadequate sociatisation, cultural and instructional language incompetence. Findings indicated that there is a need for nurse educators to model critical thinking in all aspects of nursing education. It is recommended that there be a whole paradigm shift in nursing education from the traditional teacher-centred methods to a more learner-centred approach that will facilitate critical thinking of student nurses. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. AR rights reserved.