Developing Critical Thinking Skills in Engineering and Nursing Students

This article discusses the development of critical thinking skills in engineering and nursing students. It analyzes the use of search engines and library access by engineering students and the application of critical thinking in academic environments by nursing students.

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Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

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Bramhall, M. D., Gray, L., Corker, C., Garnett, K., & Hill, R. (2012). Analysis of Critical
Thinking Skills in an International, Cross-Institutional Group of Engineering Master's
Students. Industry and Higher Education, 26(4), 323-327.
In this research articles, the primary aim pf the researchers was to identify the
conceptualization of critical thinking of international students and determine that their thinking is
not well developed. In this purpose, the paper discusses that there are instances, when the
professors of different engineering colleges have identified that there are few students of specific
cultural background who are not being able to focus or apply their critical thinking skills in their
learning process (Bramhall et al., 2012). To understand the ability of the students in identifying
the critical situations and use their critical thinking, blooms taxonomy was used by the
researchers so that the learning and development can be determined further, a range of several
themes was identified and as per these, the researchers expected that the teachers or professors of
those students will be helping them. After that they were provided with a questionnaire in which
they had to identify several answers depending on their critical thinking and they were assessed
with several themes of analysis. From the finding it was determined that the students used 86%
of their library site and 82% of their university sites. Further they also used general search
engines like google to find 79% of their answers (Bramhall et al., 2012). Hence, the paper
concluded that the critical thinking related development of the engineering students are not
properly developed as they have used search engines and library access to answer several
questions which should be given without any external support. However, this paper also
mentions that those students were not aware of the absence of their critical thinking as they used
to follow the critical thinking process and learning style for their assessment. However, the paper

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missed the aspect of different cultural background on the lack of critical thinking, thereby
possesses the aspect of future work (Bramhall et al., 2012).
Price, B. (2015). Applying critical thinking to nursing. Nursing Standard, 29(51).
The primary purpose of this article was to determine the critical thinking ability of
nursing students. The article primarily focuses on the critical thinking in academic environment
and determined that it is the academic environment that enables the nursing professionals to
apply critical thinking in their practice, starting from theory to reflective purposes. Further, by
focusing on a set of questions, the article determines the level of critical thinking ability of
nursing students and provide them with the purpose of these. For this purpose, to define the
critical thinking process, different theories were used as per the classification of the critical
thinking. As per this, an examination based on different arguments was included in the study and
the nursing students were asked to provide justification of their thoughts regarding that event.
There were total 6 critical thinking related questions, and 6 reflective study related process was
included in the study and they were assessed depending on the six levels of the critical thinking
theories. Such as, identification of necessary information, application, understanding, analysis,
evaluation and creativeness. Therefore, using these the articles was reexamination is required to
understand the significance of critical thinking that too with precision and risk management.
There are differences in social and academic way of critical thinking, however defining
questions, concepts and others are same in every setting. Therefore it is up to the nursing
professional and the environment as these determine the effectiveness of level and ability of the
person to apply critical thinking to overcome any situation.

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References
Bramhall, M. D., Gray, L., Corker, C., Garnett, K., & Hill, R. (2012). Analysis of Critical
Thinking Skills in an International, Cross-Institutional Group of Engineering Master's
Students. Industry and Higher Education, 26(4), 323-327.
Price, B. (2015). Applying critical thinking to nursing. Nursing Standard, 29(51).