The Effect of concept mapping teaching method on critical thinking skills of nursing students

Student's thinking skill is always a complex issue in education, and nowadays it has taken a more serious condition because conventional methods of teaching such as lectures as the dominant method used in higher education system is a passive style which ignores critical thinking. This study was performed to investigate the effect of concept mapping on critical thinking skills of the nursing students.

In a quasi-experimental study with two groups, pre-test post-test design, 40 nursing students of the third semester were selected through convenient sampling method, and they were randomly divided into two experiment and control groups. Students were trained by using concept maps in the experimental group for six sessions of two hours, and traditional methods in the control group for five sessions of two hours respectively. The statistical analysis was done by SPSS software version 19. To analyze the data, descriptive statistics, independent t-test, and paired t-test were used.

The results showed that the use of concept mapping method of teaching, significantly increased post test mean scores in the experimental group (p=0/000). Comparing to the control group, after applying concept mapping, the mean scores of critical thinking in the experimental group significantly increased except in the fields of ​​evaluation (p=0/201) and inductive reasoning (p=0/209).

Applying active learning strategies such as concept mapping method can improve learning and critical thinking skills as a basic principle in the students.