Concept mapping: A strategy for teaching and evaluation in nursing education
Introduction
The evolving health care practice arena requires nurses who are capable of providing safe, competent and efficient care within an increasingly complex array of patient care needs and interdisciplinary healthcare teams. More than ever before, nurses must be critical thinkers, problem-solvers and effective decision-makers capable of making constructive contributions to desired health care outcomes. For these reasons, learning to think critically is now widely accepted as a basic goal in nursing education (Daly, 1998, Di Vito-Thomas, 2000, Facione and Facione, 1996, Maynard, 1996).
Various strategies to promote critical thinking dispositions and skills have been tried in nursing education. The controversies around the definition and measurement of critical thinking have challenged how it can be taught and learned. One developing area in the literature regarding how this might be done involves the use of concept mapping (Daley et al., 1999, Hicks-Moore, 2005, Harpaz et al., 2004, Irvine, 1995, Novak and Gowin, 1984). In this paper we first review the meaning of critical thinking and various methods that been used to facilitate and measure it. As one promising approach to facilitating critical thinking, we then review concept mapping in relation to what it is and how it works. Finally, we summarize the reports about concept mapping as a means to the critical thinking skills necessary for clinical learning in nursing practice. From this synthesis of the literature reviewed for this paper, we conclude that concept mapping is an important way to both teach and learn in clinical nursing education settings. At the end, we call for the need to now consider more deliberately the potential role of concept mapping as a strategy to evaluate critical thinking as a learning outcome in clinical nursing education.
Section snippets
What is critical thinking?
Theories of critical thinking can be traced back to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (Adler, 1978). Almost 25 centuries ago when Socrates talked about rationality, he envisioned reasoning as a force for promoting moral good. His student, Plato, argued the goal of education should not be to provide information, but rather to enable students to question, examine, and reflect upon ideas and values presented to them. Then Aristotle, a student of Plato, posited that phenomena can be clarified through
Concept mapping
The development of concept maps originated from the work of Novak (1992) and his colleagues in the 1980s at Cornell University. Concept mapping has been widely used in science, mathematics, and educational psychology. Its utilization in nursing education is fairly recent (Irvine, 1995). In an introductory article outlining extensive evidence from other disciplines about the effectiveness of concept mapping in helping students learn, Irvine urged nurse educators to consider it as a teaching and
Conclusions and future implications
In spite of the variations in how critical thinking is defined and characterized or questions about whether it can be intentionally taught and learned, there is much support for critical thinking as an important metacognitive skill for developing the knowledge necessary for effective nursing practice. Continued exploration of strategies to promote critical thinking is imperative. From the literature reviewed for this paper, concept mapping has been identified as a technique for developing and
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2019, Nurse Education TodayCitation Excerpt :Deep student learning is subsequently attained (Nielsen, 2013) and students will gradually become familiar with the patient population and clinical environment (Nielsen, 2009), thus enhancing their knowledge and decision-making capabilities (West, 2016). Concept-mapping was developed by Novak in 1972 to promote critical thinking (Gul and Boman, 2006). The implementation of concept-mapping includes: assimilating new concepts in circles or boxes; creating hierarchical arrangements between concepts and sub-concepts; and identifying relationships between concepts and sub-concepts that can be connected with lines or linking words (Rochmawati and Weichula, 2010).
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