a systematic review of methods for assessing clinical reasoning in nursing students

Background & objective: nursing instructors can play a crucial role in enhancing students' clinical reasoning skills by evaluating them and offering timely, constructive feedback. therefore, identifying effective clinical reasoning assessment tools is vital for accomplishing this objective. to this end, this study aimed to review the methods for assessing clinical reasoning in nursing students. materials & methods: this systematic review was conducted in may 2024 using the keywords clinical reasoning and nursing students. eligible articles published in both english and persian were systematically searched in various national and international online databases, including sid, magiran, scopus, web of science, pubmed, and proquest.results: a total of 2893 articles were retrieved from the initial search findings. after removing duplicates and irrelevant articles based on the inclusion criteria, a qualitative assessment was conducted using the critical appraisal skills programme (casp), the mixed methods appraisal tool (mmat), and the joanna briggs institute (jbi) checklists. ultimately, 20 articles on clinical reasoning assessment tools for nursing students were reviewed. the findings revealed that researchers utilize a range of tools to assess clinical reasoning, with the most common being the nurses clinical reasoning scale (ncrs), script concordance tests (scts), key feature tests, outcome-present state test (opt), rubrics, and the triple jump exercise. however, the validity and reliability of the tools used and their acceptability and cost-effectiveness have not been assessed in the literature.conclusion: the findings indicated that the ncrs is the most commonly used assessment tool. therefore, conducting psychometric evaluations of this tool in iran is recommended. furthermore, longitudinal studies are needed to evaluate the impact of clinical reasoning assessment tools on nursing students and explore how these tools can be effectively integrated into nursing curricula.