Concept mapping: A strategy for teaching and evaluation in nursing education

Summary

In the past decade an increasing emphasis has been placed on the importance of critical thinking in nursing. Nurse educators are faced with the challenge of finding ways to promote and evaluate critical thinking in nursing students, and various teaching strategies have been identified to achieve this goal. Concept maps are considered a powerful metacognitive tool that can facilitate the acquisition of knowledge through meaningful learning. Hence concept mapping can be used to promote and evaluate critical thinking. Based on the published nursing literature, the scope of concept mapping is discussed in this paper as a teaching and evaluation strategy for critical thinking 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.