The purpose of this study was to investigate factors associated with the critical thinking ability of nursing students at the individual and school levels. The study adopted a descriptive design and recruited 465 nursing students from four nursing schools from November 2014 to September 2015 through convenience sampling. The Clinical Critical Thinking Skill Test was used to measure critical thinking ability, and the data were analyzed with the SAS ver. 9.4 program (SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC, USA) for descriptive statistics, t-test, analysis of variance, and multi-level model. The results showed that clinical practicum experience (β=−0.72, p=0.025), taking critical thinking courses (β=0.63, p=0.010), and taking simulation courses (β=0.56, p=0.035) improved critical thinking ability in the individual level model. In the school level model, the interaction effect between the years of clinical practice done by the student and the presence of full-time clinical instructors was significant (β=1.29, p=0.011). These results suggest that critical thinking ability improves with the more years of clinical practice individual nursing students have, and this improvement is greater with the presence of full-time clinical instructors in the school. Therefore, it is recommended that nursing students undergo critical thinking and simulation courses to develop their critical thinking ability, and dedicated clinical instructors in nursing schools should play a vital role.
Humans ; Nursing ; Preceptorship ; Problem Solving ; Schools, Nursing ; Simulation Training ; Students, Nursing ; Thinking

BACKGROUND: Molecular epidemiological typing of Neisseria gonorrhoeae is crucial for monitoring the spread of resistant strains. As reference strains can be used for laboratory internal quality control, we genetically characterised the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) gonococcal strains by Neisseria gonorrhoeae multiantigen sequence typing (NG-MAST) and porB sequence typing using public multilocus sequence typing (PubMLST). METHODS: Eight ATCC gonococcal reference strains (ATCC 19424, ATCC 31426, ATCC 35541, ATCC 43069, ATCC 43070, ATCC 49226, ATCC 49926, and ATCC 49981) from Culti-Loops (Thermo Fisher Scientific, USA) were cultured. After DNA extraction, porB and tbpB were amplified and sequenced. Sequence types (STs) and allele numbers were each determined by NG-MAST (http://www.ng-mast.net) and porB sequence typing using PubMLST (http://pubmlst.org/neisseria/porB/). RESULTS: ATCC 19424 was identified as ST 266 by NG-MAST, and as Allele 946 by PubMLST. ATCC31426 was assigned a novel ST by NG-MAST, and was assigned Allele 958 with 1.2% mismatch by PubMLST. ATCC 35541 was identified as ST 12 by NG-MAST, and as Allele 624 by PubMLST. ATCC 43069 and ATCC 43070 were both identified as ST 681 by NG-MAST, and as Allele 984 by PubMLST. ATCC 49226 was identified as ST 1572 by NG-MAST, and as Allele 2110 by PubMLST. ATCC 49926 and ATCC 49981 were both identified as ST 16496 by NG-MAST, and as Allele 928 by PubMLST. CONCLUSIONS: The ST data obtained for ATCC gonococcal reference strains by NG-MAST and porB sequence typing using PubMLST can be used for quality assurance of molecular epidemiological typing in clinical microbiological laboratories.
Alleles ; DNA ; Multilocus Sequence Typing ; Neisseria gonorrhoeae ; Neisseria ; Quality Control