Students' philosophical assumptions and psychology in the classroom

The current study investigated the underlying philosophical assumptions, or world views, that undergraduate nursing students bring to the psychology classroom. It was hypothesized that students would most prefer mechanistic explanations of behavior, explanations derived from an analytical, linear, cause-and-effect model. It was also hypothesized that they would least prefer contextualistic explanations of behavior, i.e., explanations derived from a synthetic, subjective, and relational model. Forty female hospital-based RN students completed a modified version of the World Hypothesis Scale. As predicted, they were significantly more likely to endorse mechanistic explanations and less likely to endorse contextualistic explanations. Because teaching psychology lends itself to a contextualistic approach in which a variety of models for understanding behavior are explored, the study of psychology can be one way to increase nursing students' critical thinking skills.