Girija G Nair
University of Saskatchewan, Canada
Title: Preliminary psychometrics of critical thinking self-assessment scale for undergraduate nursing students
Biography
Biography: Girija G Nair
Abstract
Critical thinking is a cognitive process and critical skill in education. Globally, accreditation processes evaluate critical thinking evidence. Critical thinking skills can lessen deception, misconception, and fallacies. Yet, instruments for measuring critical thinking skills in nursing are limited. A Critical Thinking Self-Assessment Scale (CTSAS) was developed and tested to: establish content validity, construct validity, reliability, and convergent validity. American Philosophical Association’s (APA) definition of critical thinking skills was used to draw a conceptual framework for this scale. The initial 196 items included six cores and 16 sub skills were developed from this conceptual framework. These items were peer reviewed and content validated by 18 experts from various disciplines. Aiken’s (1985) validity coefficient VIk 0.73 for 14 items, (value of 0.66 for 17 experts), I-CVI Validity Index of ≥ 0.78 was used for the rejection region, facilitated the content validation (reducing the 196 items to 115). These 115 items were tested for construct validity on two groups of nursing students (India 887) using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) which reduced CTSAS to 90 items. A further confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of the 90 items on Canadian (144) sample using path diagrams in AMOS to establish model fit. The CFA confirmed a best fit of four core skills. The final CTSAS met high reliability (α=.960, for India and α=.975 for Canada) and convergent validity (α=.831). While our findings indicate that CTSAS met psychometrics, additional studies are needed to support social reliability, cultural sensitivity and refinement of the tool.