Critical Thinking for Nursing, Health and Social Care

Rena Frohman, Karen Lupton

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781352009798
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350314665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

This practical book will equip students with the critical thinking, reading and writing skills required to succeed both on their course and in their professional placements. It takes readers through the core stages of working on an assignment, from finding and evaluating sources through to critically reading material and demonstrating critical analysis in their writing. With chapters featuring content-specific examples and engaging exercises, this book is an essential resource for undergraduate students of Nursing, Health, Social Care and related disciplines.

CHAPTER

1

What Is Critical Thinking?

This chapter:

• Briefly introduces definitions and explanations for critical thinking commonly used in health and social care education

• Links critical thinking skills to working in health and social care professions

• Provides examples of critical thinking models that can help you understand what academics mean when they talk about critical thinking.

One of the key factors for success at university is being able to show that you can not only describe what you’ve learnt from course materials and independent research, but also show how well you can analyse, question and evaluate this information. These thinking processes, often called cognitive processes, belong to a set of skills and attitudes that form critical thinking.

Being critical means being thoughtful and analytical about what you hear, see, read and experience.

To demonstrate critical thinking in your assessments and in professional contexts, you need to choose appropriate and relevant sources of information to support your ideas, opinions or answers for health or social care problems. This means you need to avoid being biased in your thinking and recognise that, in complex situations, health and social care practitioners need to consider a range of opinions and options based on high-quality and reliable evidence that come from trustworthy sources.

As you progress through your course you may observe academics and professionals in your field referring to critical thinking using different language and ideas. Here are some examples of how critical thinking can be defined and explained (Cottrell, 2017; Bottomley and Pryjmachuk, 2018):

• Identifying other people’s ideas and comparing different ideas and evidence without bias

• Evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of evidence

• Reflecting on the evidence to see if there are missing ideas or facts

• Pulling different ideas together (synthesising) to create new ideas

• Applying evidence to real situations

• Justifying ideas, decisions and opinions with evidence from synthesised sources of information

While there is no single definition of critical thinking, in this book we define critical thinking as applying all of those thinking skills listed above in order to come to a judgement on an argument or idea. Critical thinking belongs to a set of skills that we use every day, but it may often happen subconsciously without reflection. After all, we make thousands of judgements, opinions and decisions about what we see, hear and read, but we don’t often stop to consider the process which led to those decisions. One way to develop better critical thinking skills is to consciously think with an internal dialogue. This is called metacognition, thinking about how you are thinking. In other words, metacognition happens when you reflect and become aware of how you make decisions. Let’s test the waters with a short activity.

ACTIVITY 1A

Forming opinions

Imagine your classmates are discussing the topic of caring for People Living with Dementia at home. Based on your knowledge and experiences, make a list of factors that family members who care for a relative living with dementia might need to consider before they decide the best place for their family member to live (e.g. at home, with a family carer, in an aged care facility?).

• How many ideas did you come up with?

• Where did your ideas come from?

• Where could you look for more information to help fill in gaps in your knowledge?

The length of the list will be influenced by various factors:

• Your depth of knowledge about People Living with Dementia

• Your experiences of interacting with People Living with Dementia in real life through family or friends’ experiences

• The media

• Underlying attitudes or beliefs and values that you have about caring for a relative.

Now read another student’s opinion. Think about how her knowledge, experiences and values may influence her future approach as a health or social care professional when discussing care strategies for People Living with Dementia.

“I’ve always believed that when people get older they naturally become more forgetful. At this stage in their lives, after they have worked so hard and contributed to the family, it is the family’s ethical duty to care for the older relative at home. I believe putting somebody into an “old people’s home” is shameful for the family and based on recent news reports aged care home residents are poorly treated. Everybody in my family thinks that personal health matters are private and decisions, such as caring for an elderly relative, should not be discussed with outsiders.”

One helpful strategy for developing critical thinking processes is to recognise that we have gaps in our knowledge and need to continually question where our information comes from and how we evaluate the information we have. In the example above, the student needs to recognise not only her personal, subjective...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Activities
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 What Is Critical Thinking?
• Chapter 2 What Is Academic Writing?
• Chapter 3 How Do You Get Started on Assessments? Using a Five-Step Process to Begin Thinking Critically
• Chapter 4 How Do You Read with a Critical Eye?
• Chapter 5 How Do You Use Evidence? Building a Logical System to Organise and Analyse Sources
• Chapter 6 How Do You Refer to the Evidence Effectively in Your Writing?
• Chapter 7 How Do You Put It All Together? Building Logical Academic Paragraphs That Demonstrate a Critical Voice
• Chapter 8 How Can You Apply Critical Thinking to Write Reflections and Develop Lifelong Learning Behaviours?
• Chapter 9 How Can You Demonstrate Critical Thinking and Effective Communication on Placement?
• Glossary
• References
• Index