Abstract

Background: Critical thinking skills are essential in today’s vastly changing world. Preparing students to think critically is a goal of many higher education professionals. CT is a core competency in nursing and has been widely discussed in nursing education. Educators with strong critical thinking dispositions will encourage students to critically reflect on the quality of their thinking as they engage them in teaching and learning and will continually monitor their own thought
processes for imperfections.
Purpose: This study assessed the critical thinking dispositions of nursing faculty in Southwestern Nigeria.
Materials and Methods: The study is a descriptive design. California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory Scale (CCTDI) was administered to 37 nursing faculty from 4 accredited baccalaureate nursing programs.

Findings: Majority of the faculty had more than 10 years of teaching experience with baccalaureate degree in nursing as the highest level of education earned in nursing. The results revealed that the means score for faculty’s CCTDI are within the positive disposition range with highest mean scores in inquisitiveness and confidence in reasoning. Conversely, the faculty group had a mean score below 40, for the truth-seeking and open-mindedness subscales. Nursing faculty had relatively high scores in inquisitiveness, confidence in reasoning, analyticity, systematicity, maturity of judgment, open mindedness and low score in truth seeking with an overall mean score of 312.08. 13.5% (n = 5) of the participants were categorized as having weak dispositional attitude toward critical thinking, 78.4% (n = 29) had positive inclination to think
critically, and 8.1% (n = 3) had high dispositions toward critical thinking.
Conclusions: Result findings indicated that nursing faculty have positive inclination toward critical thinking. These results suggest that faculty demonstrate hesitant desire for best knowledge and are cautious in their self-monitoring for possible bias. Therefore, they are inconsistent in seeking out adequate information. The results suggest that nursing educators have the critical thinking dispositional scores that would incline them to use critical thinking. Thus, they can effectively promote the development of CT skills in students. However, since the faculty are identified to be hesitant in using truth-seeking and open-mindedness based on their scores, they may be less likely to be open to innovative and evidence-based methods of teaching to facilitate learning because of personal teaching-learning preferences. The classroom environment of such faculty may be faculty centered and not student centered.