Asking the Right Questions: Using Scaffolding to Promote Critical Thinking in Novice Nurses

 Nurse educators/teachers influence success of novice nurses and must therefore be prepared with strategies to enable novice nurses in developing critical thinking. Traditional, didactic teaching approaches common in academia are increasingly proving to be ineffective at developing critical thinking in clinical learning environments. Critical thinking: advanced, high-level processing and application of knowledge to contextualized situations, recognizing complexity and nuances, analyzing data and evidence-based information, evaluating options, and self-reflecting. Scaffolding questions: guided questioning intended to expand and promote evolution of learner’s thinking and knowledge according to their individual learning needs, while teacher’s support is gradually withdrawn.