Objective To apply the unfolding case based learning in nursing education and evaluate the effectiveness. Methods Totally 122 undergraduate nursing students participated this one-year research program and were divided into two groups. The experiment group was taught with unfolding nursing cases， while the normal nursing cases were applied to the control group. The effectiveness of this pedagogical was evaluated via the Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory-Chinese Version（CTDI-CV） and the final examination. Results After one year‘s experiment， the experiment group scored 303.77±15.24 of CTDI-CV， while the control group scored 288.34±13.94. The difference was statistically significant. And the experiment group got significant better performance in the final examination. Conclusions The pedagogics of applying unfolding nursing cases in nursing education is effective to facilitate the nursing students’ critical thinking and academic performance.