title: Clinical decision making of experienced and novice nurses.
abstract: Decision making is an important daily nursing activity. Given contradictory past findings concerning the ease of use cognitive schema for reaching decisions among experts and novices, we chose to examine consistency of information as a parameter that may clarify the process of decision making. Ninety-two experienced nurses and 65 nursing students rated their decisional difficulty and levels of certainty in reaching a diagnosis for two scenarios: one including consistent information and one providing information that was partly inconsistent with the given diagnosis. For the consistent information, students showed more difficulty and less certainty in the given diagnosis than the experienced nurses. The inconsistent scenario was perceived as more difficult by nurses in comparison to students. The cognitive processes responsible for these results are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Nursing, School of Health Professions, Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Israel.
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Tabak
authors.forename: Y
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Bar-Tal
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Cohen-Mansfield
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D019336:Cognitive Science; D003657:Decision Making; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007557:Israel; D009733:Nursing Diagnosis; D009741:Nursing Staff, Hospital; D013338:Students, Nursing