Critical Thinking

Practicing NCLEX questions will help a little with "critical thinking", but I think the biggest factor is just experience - which is hard to come by when you are in school. I don't think they will expect you to anticipate things that have not been covered in class yet. But the goal here is to get you to think about "Why would this be happening?", "What is causing this response?", "What do I need to do about it?", and "What is really the most important thing here?". Critical thinking questions are not the kind where you can say, "Oh look, the answer is on page 103." You need to factor in lots of different tidbits of information and come up with an answer that is relevant.

Those are the kind of questions on the NCLEX. So, study, and ask lots of questions. Apply what you hear in class to what you see in clinical. I learned lots of things in clinical that we never discussed in lecture. And also, be creative!