Developing Critical Thinking Skills in Undergraduate Nursing Students using Strategic Management Simulations

Abstract

A quasi-experimental design was employed to determine the effectiveness of Strategic Management Simulations (SMS) in the development of critical thinking skills (CTS) of undergraduate nursing students. Recommendations from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) provide a prescription for the essentials in nursing education, which include as an outcome, the ability for new graduate nurses to be effective critical thinkers. Despite the efforts of nurse educators to provide effective means to teach CTS, research concludes that new graduates are often unable to make sound clinical decisions. Grounded in complexity theory, SMS provides a simulated assessment that determines cognitive ability on 25 parameters; five were selected by the developer of SMS for this study. After the simulation, participants received feedback on their results, followed by individualized training which helped increase any areas that could benefit from development. Study participants in the intervention group were tested with the SMS assessment at the beginning and at the end of the nursing program. Control group data were obtained from archival SMS scores of students who completed the SMS assessment at the end of their academic program, without receiving any of the SMS training. These data were used to describe CTS, inferential analysis included both paired sample and independent sample T-tests to identify any variances between the intervention group and the control group. A post hoc power analysis determined that these data provide an alpha of 0.05 and the ability to detect a moderate (> 0.6) effect size.