Concept Mapping as a Teaching Tool on Critical Thinking Skills and Academic Performance of Diploma Nursing Students

In today’s challenging and highly complex health care settings nurses must be able to think critically. With the current traditional and rote methods of learning, the critical thinking skills among the students are seen to diminish. As nurse educators must find a different method in their teaching on how to encourage students to engage in analytical thinking and how to make the analytical thinking process part of their daily practice due to increase safety of the patients. This will give challenge for the nurse educators to reshape education by adopting instructional strategies to equip students with foundational knowledge in critical thinking, creative problem solving and collaboration. Through concept mapping, students should be able to transfer applied didactic objectives from the classroom to the clinical practice, where critical thinking and problem solving skills are needed for success. It also provide nurse educators with the ability to help students learn how to organise data, prioritise patient needs and can relate patient medical illness and nursing intervention.