The Effect of Concept Map Use in Nursing Practice on Clinical Decision Making and Reflective Thinking Levels: A Randomized Controlled Study

With the rapid development and change in technology and modern medicine, expectations, tendencies, personality characteristics and learning styles of individuals change. At the same time, today s modern medical environment requires nurses to have analytical thinking, independent decision-making and application skills in clinical practice. One of the main objectives of nursing education is to provide students with critical thinking and decision-making skills and to reflect what they have learnt in theory to their clinical practice skills. The World Health Organisation also recommends the use of innovative and active learning methods, appropriate teaching materials and learning techniques in nursing education. One of the most important modern teaching methods that will facilitate meaningful learning among students is concept maps developed on the basis of Ausubel s Learning Assimilation Theory. At the same time, clinical decision making and reflective thinking are important elements in nursing practice and undergraduate nursing education. One of the most important goals of nursing education is to provide educational approaches to develop these concepts.

The main question[s] it aims to answer are:

• Does collecting data from the patient using a concept map instead of a traditional care plan in the clinic affect student s; clinical decision-making level?
• Does preparing a patient care plan using a concept map instead of a traditional care plan in the clinic affect student s; reflective thinking skill level in the clinic?

Research Process:

• Both groups will be administered sociodemographic data form, clinical decision-making scale in nursing, reflective thinking determination scale and teaching material evaluation form as face-to-face pre-test before the training.
• The control group will use the traditional method data collection form and care plan.
• The experimental group will be given face-to-face training before starting the application. The scope of the training will consist of the definition of concept mapping, the aims and benefits of its use in the nursing education process, the principles of concept mapping, the introduction of the materials to be used in the process of data collection and care plan preparation, concept mapping examples specific to 3 different medical cases to improve nursing student s; understanding and comprehension of concept mapping and to increase their interest in learning techniques.
• After the training, students will be asked to collect data and make a care plan using a concept map.
• After data collection, face-to-face sociodemographic data form, clinical decision-making scale in nursing, scale for determining the level of reflective thinking and teaching material evaluation form will be applied as a post-test. Population and sample: G*Power 3.1.9.7 sampling calculation programme was used to calculate the sample size in the study. Considering the mean±standard deviation values of the Clinical Decision Making in Nursing scale, the total sample size was calculated as 56, with a minimum of 28 for each group, with an effect size of 0.79 and a margin of error of ± 0.05 at the 82% confidence interval level. However, the research will be started with 33 participants by taking 20% more than the sample size determined by taking into account the situation of the participants leaving the research during the process.