The Effect of Concept Mapping on Nursing Students' Critical Thinking Skills and Nursing Care Plan Design

Introduction: The concept mapping method has been used in nursing education for many years; However, limited studies have examined its effect on critical thinking skills and nursing care program design. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of concept mapping method on critical thinking skills and nursing care program in nursing students. Methods: This two- group educational trial was conducted as a pre-test and post- test on 84 nursing students who were selected using convenience sampling, in 2018- 2019. control group were  taught using traditional nursing care plan and and experimental group by concept mapping  respectiely.Critical thinking skills were measured with the California Critical Thinking Test, which yielded five subscales: analysis, evaluation, inference, deductive and inductive reasoning. Nursing processes were scored using a concept map scoring scale. Descriptive statistics, chi- square, independent and paired t- test and analysis of covariance were used to analyze the data. Results: Analysis of covariance showed that the scores of critical thinking of the experimental group in the areas of analysis (p = 0.046) and deductive reasoning (p = 0.025) were significantly higher than the control group. Also, the score of the nursing process in the experimental group was higher than the control group (p < 0.001). Conclusion: The findings suggest that concept mapping is effective to strenghten students᾽ analysis and inductive reasoning of critical thinking and designing nursing care plan.