UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    Relations among Topic Knowledge, Individual Interest, and Relational Reasoning, and Critical Thinking in Maternity Nursing
    (2016) Fountain, Lily; Alexander, Patricia A.; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Critical thinking in learners is a goal of educators and professional organizations in nursing as well as other professions. However, few studies in nursing have examined the role of the important individual difference factors topic knowledge, individual interest, and general relational reasoning strategies in predicting critical thinking. In addition, most previous studies have used domain-general, standardized measures, with inconsistent results. Moreover, few studies have investigated critical thinking across multiple levels of experience. The major purpose of this study was to examine the degree to which topic knowledge, individual interest, and relational reasoning predict critical thinking in maternity nurses. For this study, 182 maternity nurses were recruited from national nursing listservs explicitly chosen to capture multiple levels of experience from prelicensure to very experienced nurses. The three independent measures included a domain-specific Topic Knowledge Assessment (TKA), consisting of 24 short-answer questions, a Professed and Engaged Interest Measure (PEIM), with 20 questions indicating level of interest and engagement in maternity nursing topics and activities, and the Test of Relational Reasoning (TORR), a graphical selected response measure with 32 items organized in scales corresponding to four forms of relational reasoning: analogy, anomaly, antithesis, and antinomy. The dependent measure was the Critical Thinking Task in Maternity Nursing (CT2MN), composed of a clinical case study providing cues with follow-up questions relating to nursing care. These questions align with the cognitive processes identified in a commonly-used definition of critical thinking in nursing. Reliable coding schemes for the measures were developed for this study. Key findings included a significant correlation between topic knowledge and individual interest. Further, the three individual difference factors explained a significant proportion of the variance in critical thinking with a large effect size. While topic knowledge was the strongest predictor of critical thinking performance, individual interest had a moderate significant effect, and relational reasoning had a small but significant effect. The findings suggest that these individual difference factors should be included in future studies of critical thinking in nursing. Implications for nursing education, research, and practice are discussed.
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    THE ASSOCIATION OF CRITICAL THINKING AND PARTICIPATION IN LIVING AND LEARNING PROGRAMS: RESIDENTIAL HONORS COMPARED TO CIVIC/SOCIAL LEADERSHIP PROGRAMS AND NON-PARTICIPATION IN LIVING AND LEARNING PROGRAMS
    (2009) Kohl, James Lucas; Cabrera, Alberto; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This study explores the association of students' self-perceived critical thinking ability with participation in Residential Honors living-learning programs versus Civic/Social Leadership living-learning programs and non-participation in living-learning programs. The study analyzes data from the 2004 National Study of Living-Learning Programs survey using Multiple Linear Regression. The sample consists of 637 First-Year students from 8 institutions of higher education from across the United States. Findings reveal that self-perceived critical thinking ability is more related to participating in Residential Honors programs than to living in the residence halls and that living-learning program participation serves as an important conduit for college experiences associated with critical thinking ability such as peer interaction, faculty interaction and residence hall climate. The results also show that less than 1% of the variance in self-perceived critical thinking for is attributable to institutional characteristics supporting the finding of Pascarella and Terenzini (2005) that between-college influences have less of an effect on student developmental outcomes during college than within-college influences. Based on the results, possible explanations for different relationships of self-perceived critical thinking ability among living-learning programs are posed, implications for practice are identified, and suggestions for future research are made.