Critical thinking in nursing and midwifery learning: Quantitative and qualitative review

Abstract

BACKGROUND: This study tried to make a quantitative and qualitative review of the scientific production of the mobilization of critical thinking in nursing and midwifery learning. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The search was carried out in the “Web of Science” and “PubMed” databases between 2001 and 2021, resulting in 43 articles using several keywords “critical thinking,” “learning”, “nursing,” “midwifery”. The study will be split into two parts: A quantitative review in the form of a bibliometric analysis and a qualitative one in the form of a literature review. The quality of the articles has been verified by assessing the risk of bias (selection bias, detection bias, and interpretation bias) and using the Standards for Quality Improvement Reporting Excellence method. RESULTS AND OBSERVATIONS: The selected articles were the subject of a quantitative study leading to several results: chronology of publications, types of publications, number of publications, top journals of publications, etc. The same articles have been processed to produce a full qualitative review of the experimental studies. CONCLUSION: The results showed that the total and annual articles need to be higher. Experimental studies, especially quasi-experimental, are far higher than reviews or descriptive studies. The qualitative research showed a controversial relationship between critical thinking and learning improvement.