Critical Thinking Assessment Tool

Critical Thinking Assessment Tool

Critical Thinking Assessment Tool
Choose a population that you believe should use critical thinking.
Develop a tool, for this specific population, that you can use to assess or measure the cognitive habits or behaviors that are part of the critical thinking process that this population uses.
For example – a novice nurse entering the nursing profession, an experienced nurse working on a new unit, parents of a child with a chronic illness, a patient who has a new diagnosis of diabetes or heart disease and must learn to self-manage the disease.

Use Box 2-5 and appendix A to choose which cognitive habits and behaviors you decide to measure.
The tool should include:

A total of eight questions, each addressing a specific cognitive habit or behavior.
A rationale for each question – why that question can measure that specific cognitive habit or behavior.
Introduce your tool with a discussion of the importance of cognitive habits or behaviors that encourage critical thinking. Provide a conclusion to pull the entire activity together.

Here is an example of one question you can ask when assessing the critical thinking skills of minority parents of overweight children.

Question: How do you feel about your child’s overall health? Your family’s health?

Rationale: This question is assessing the critical thinking skill or habit of the mind: contextual perspective. Assessing how the parents feel about their family’s overall health would give the nurse a view of their contextual perspective. Parents who are cognizant of their children’s or overall family’s weight issues, poor eating habits, or lack of exercise can result in the potential consequences of childhood obesity such as hypertension, asthma, and diabetes. (Rubenfeld & Scheffer, 2015).

Question

Rationale

How do you feel about your child’s overall health? Your family’s health?