Although critical thinking has become a core competency in the practice of nursing and a major apprehension of undergraduate nursing courses, observably, too many nursing graduates are unable to think critically. This has led to the provision of poor-quality care to patients. How nursing students are taught to acquire critical thinking remains unclear and is a call for concern. This study therefore sought to examine teacher’s use of the questioning method in fostering critical thinking in State Registered Nursing (SRN) students in Fako Division of Cameroon. An exploratory sequential research design with the collection of both qualitative and quantitative data for triangulation was adopted for the study. Data was collected via interviews with 16 teachers and 4 focus group discussions with year two students from the selected SRN schools. 42 teachers and 105 year two students were also administered questionnaires. 24 classroom observations were carried out to observe teachers’ questioning skills and finally 205 examination questions were analysed using Blooms taxonomy. Thematic analysis was used for qualitative data while quantitative data was analysed using the statistical package for social sciences version 20.0 for descriptive statistics. The age range for students was between 18 to 26 years and a majority 92 (87.62%) were females while a majority of the teachers 15 (35.72%), had a work experience of 2-5 years and 6- 10 years. The major theme that emerged from the interviews was ‘question and answers” and the categories included “selected students’ response” and “insufficient motivation”. Quantitative data analysis revealed several practice gaps such as 72 (68.5%) of the students disagreed that teachers do not focus questions on particular students, while 70 (66.6%) disagreed that teachers allowed adequate time for them to reflect before responding to questions. The findings also revealed that majority of the written examination questions 199 (97.07%) fell under the category of lower thinking order skills. Teachers do not use the questioning method appropriately, hence cannot effectively foster critical thinking in nursing students. The organisation of training workshops on how to use questions to foster CT is therefore necessary.

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