Iran Journal of Nursing

  Background and Aims: Critical thinking is essential to nursing practice therefore, knowledge and understanding of nursing students' critical thinking is important to nurse educators. The purpose of this study was to determine critical thinking dispositions in baccalaureate nursing students.

  Material and methods: It was a descriptive study. Research population was all baccalaurate nursing students in third and fourth year in Azad and Shahid Sadooghi University of Medical Sciences and were studying in second trimester of 2007-2008. The sample included 170 students and recruited randomly. Data was collected by questionnaire and had two parts. The first part included demographics and the second part was the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory

  Results: It revealed that 81/8% of students' critical thinking disposition were ambivalent and inqisitiveness subscale in 57/6%, analyticity in 62/4% and self confidence in 51/8% were positive and open-indedness in 76/5%, systematicity in 80/6%, maturity in 65/3% were ambivalent, truth seeking subscale in 67/1% was negative.

  Conclusion: regarding the findings which indicated critical thinking of baccalaureate nursing students is ambivalent, using special strategies to improve critical thinking disposition is emphasized.