Nurse Educators’ Perspectives on Nursing Students’ Critical Thinking Skills and Barriers for Effective Teaching: A Descriptive Cross‐Sectional Study

Background Critical thinking enhances the capacity of contemporary nurses to manifest high‐order meta‐cognitive thinking competencies in clinical reasoning and judgment, decision‐making, and problem‐solving. Aim The present study aimed to assess the nurse educators’ perspectives on nursing students’ critical thinking skills and barriers for effective teaching in Saudi Arabia. Methods A descriptive cross‐sectional design was employed. The data collection phase was executed over four months, from the beginning of October 2022 to the end of January 2023. Two questionnaires were developed and updated by the researchers after reviewing related literature to collect the required data from the study population, which consisted of nurse educators and undergraduate nursing students from Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University (IAU), College of Nursing in Saudi Arabia. Convenient sampling was applied. The sample included 53 nurse educators and 415 nursing students. Data were analyzed using the SPSS program. Results It can be noticed that more than 50 percentages (58%) of the students were perceived as moderate level of critical thinking, about one‐third (34%) as low level, and the rest as high level. Furthermore, the perceived barriers of critical thinking by nurse educators illustrated that the highest percentage was related to students’ intellectual characteristics, followed by institutional environment, policy of the educational system, and educational program. The lowest was related to nurse educators. Conclusion It can be concluded that the critical thinking skills’ levels were moderate as perceived by the nurse students. While a low level of barriers was documented by educators, which indicated a positive trend toward the integration of critical thinking in nursing education. A statistically significant relationship was demonstrated between demographic characteristics such as academic year and critical thinking skills. The t ‐test compares two groups’ means, while ANOVA compares multiple groups’ means. Significance is set at p < 0.05, with p < 0.01 being highly significant.