Understanding Synthesis Across Disciplines to Improve Nursing Education.

Nursing students must learn higher-order thinking skills of analysis and synthesis to manage complex data for decision making in healthcare. Teaching synthesis, however, is challenging and elusive due to lack of understanding of the concept and an explicit pedagogy for teaching it. A qualitative, multi-phased research project was designed to gain understanding of what synthesis is, how professionals acquire synthesis skills, and how to best teach synthesis.

Reliability of assessment of critical thinking.

Although clinical critical thinking skills and behaviors are among the most highly sought characteristics of BSN graduates, they remain among the most difficult to teach and assess. Three reasons for this difficulty have been (1) lack of agreement among nurse educators as to the definition of critical thinking, (2) low correlation between clinical critical thinking and existing standardized tests of critical thinking, and (3) poor reliability in scoring other evidences of critical thinking, such as essays. This article first describes a procedure for teaching critical thinking that is based on a consensus definition of 17 dimensions of critical thinking in clinical nursing practice.

A consensus statement on critical thinking in nursing.

The purpose of this study was to define critical thinking in nursing. A Delphi technique with 5 rounds of input was used to achieve this purpose. An international panel of expert nurses from nine countries: Brazil, Canada, England, Iceland, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Thailand, and 23 states in the U.

Management of ophthalmic complications in surgery of the brain stem.

This article reviews assessment and rehabilitation of abnormalities of the afferent and efferent visual system that may follow surgery of the brain stem. Attention is drawn to newer techniques of assessment (contrast sensitivities and binocular visual fields) and of management (low vision aids, Fresnel prisms, botulinum toxin injections, and adjustable suture strabismus surgery).