Title: Effect of Concept Mapping in Development of Critical thinking (CT) Skills among B. Sc Nursing Students Objectives: To evaluate the effectiveness of concept mapping as a teaching strategy to develop critical thinking skills. Materials and Methods: Pretest, post test control group design was used. The IV year B.Sc nursing students were included as experimental group (n=40) and control group (n=44). The experimental group was given a training to prepare nursing care plans using concept mapping. The training programme was for 12 weeks where the participants were given case study scenarios every week to prepare nursing care plans using concept map. The experimental group and control group were again assessed for the critical thinking skills. The concept maps were evaluated using scoring criteria. Results: In the post test, there was a significant difference in the critical thinking scores of both the groups at 0.05 level. (t=2.16). A significant improvement was identified between the pretest and post test critical thinking scores of experiment group at 0.05 level (t=2.0). Comparison of concept mapping scores of the experimental group in the pretest and post test showed a highly significant difference at 0.041 level. Conclusion: The study was able to show a significant improvement in the critical thinking skills of nursing students. However, the critical thinking scores were poor due to the high standard of the assessment tool. It is needed to develop critical thinking skill assessment tool which will suit the nursing community and further research is required to promote concept mapping as a teaching and learning strategy.

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This paper describes the results of a modified Delphi approach to gain consensus on a core competency framework for entry level nursing graduates in Karnataka. Based on extensive review of literature, A series of semi structured questionnaires were mailed to fifteen experts from nursing education and Practice and after refining and validating the competency statements consensus in core competency framework emerged consisting of nine distinct Domains - Valuing Human Beings, Professional Nursing Practice, Communication and Interpersonal Relationship, Professional, Legal and Ethical framework, Knowledge and application of knowledge, collaborative therapeutic Practice, Research Utilization , Management of Nursing Services, Professional Advancement with accompanying competency elements and Performance Criteria. . This core competency framework based on the Indian Nursing Council's Standards of Nursing Practice was developed as a benchmark to outline the minimum entry level competencies for new nursing graduates. This study finds potential value in standardising the Competencies to be acquired for nursing graduates and also setting the path forward for a Competency Based Assessment.

Traditional student evaluations have always been by the teaching faculty with less or no input from the nurses, patients, peers or even student's self. The objective of our study was to use 360 degree feedback in the evaluation of core competencies of final year nursing students and compare the ratings of RN, patients, peers and self rating of student. 374 final year students of selected nursing colleges in Bangalore and Tumkur were enrolled for the study. Patients, RN, peers and students themselves completed evaluator-specific evaluations in the first week of clinical period by using a validated 3 point rating scale of 40 items for both the peer and self and 21 and 20 items for the patients and RN respectively. Mean scores were tallied for each domain and for the total scale. Agreement between the raters was done using Pearson's correlation coefficient. A total of 1496 evaluations were completed for 374 samples. The mean item score ranged from 4.86 to 5.17 across all competency domains. The overall mean rating score for self, peer, client and RN was 43.7(SD 3.16), 43.6 (SD 2.34), 20.6 (SD 1.65) and 20.2 (SD 1.83) respectively. The self and peer ratings of the students were higher than the ratings of RN's and patients. None of the students were at the novice level. The Pearson's correlation coefficient between peer and self evaluation was statistically significant(r=0.28; p at 0.01 level). There was a weak but statistically significant positive relationship between peer and RN evaluation(r=0.11; p at 0.05 level). As different raters rated the students differently there was no significant relationship between self, patient, and RN ratings. This study finds potential value in the use of 360 degree evaluation of nursing students in both the hospital and community settings.