The effects of a cognitive pathway to promote class creative thinking. An experimental study on Italian primary school students

Abstract

The goal of this experimental research was to demonstrate that creative thinking could be trained in primary school children. After asserting the difficulty to determine a unique definition of creativitythe concept fits to several fields and areas of intereststhe capacity to produce numerous ideas and to think divergently was chosen as the framework within creativity as a way of thinking that can be assessed and measured. Even though creativity is challenging to define and consequently to operationalize, tests exist with the purpose to evaluate creativity levels in individuals. Starting from the Test of Child Creativity (TCI) an Italian mental reactive aimed at measuring the potential of creative thinking in individual children, a Group Creativity Assessment (gTCI) was made up with the objective to test 224 children belonging to 10 primary school classes (5 second grades and 5 third grades), achieving creativity scores of groups. The aim was to investigate whether children's attitude to think divergently would improve after participating in a creativity training made up of 10 interactive one-hour long sessions. For that reason, all the sample of children were tested in T0 before the training; afterward 8 out of the 10 classes were weekly trained, before being all 10 classes tested again in T1, 10 weeks after T0. The hypothesis was that the trained classes would have improved in creative thinking, whereas the control groups would have not. It was therefore demonstrated the efficacy of the specific technique to train creative thinking that was conceived, developed and administered to the children.

The Effectiveness of Creative Thinking Training on the Critical Thinking and Media Literacy in Students

“…Given the Eta coefficient value, it can be said that the effect of creative thinking training on critical thinking is 0.78, which means that creative thinking training accounts for 78% of the variance of critical thinking. The findings were in line with the findings of Lucchiari et al (2019), Al-Sufi (2019), Fung (2017) and Groza et al (2016). One of the main goals of education is to create conditions and facilities that will foster students' creativity and enhance their knowledge and ability to fit their talents.…”

“…In today's world, nurturing creative thinking is one of the core pillars of the educational system, and schools play a major role in the development of students' creative thinking. Psychologists believe that schools can teach people creative ways of thinking and ways to enhance their creative abilities, because it is assumed that children have an innate passion for discovery that education must nurture (Freina, Bottino, & Ferlino, 2018;Lucchiari, Sala, & Vanutelli, 2019). On the one hand, one of the most important facets of human distinction from other creatures is creative thinking.…”

“…Individuals need critical thinking skills and competencies to deal with life's issues and make fundamental decisions. In order for a person to make an important decision in life, he must be able to analyze, evaluate, and judge his or her living conditions (D'Alessio et al, 2019;Howard et al, 2015;Lucchiari et al, 2019). Having critical thinking skills and abilities allows individuals to process information about themselves in life, objectively reason and derive results from a variety of information types, and effectively, objectively, and tangibly evaluate problems, and Incomplete information, reasoned decision making.…”

“…The results showed that thinking training in group learning is effective on enhancing students' creative and critical thinking. Lucchiari et al (2019), in a study, examined the impact of cognitive pathways to promote classroom creative thinking among Italian elementary students. The results indicated that the trained children had higher levels of creative thinking than untrained children in the control group.…”

Analysis of Pedagogic Competence of Elementary School Teachers Based on Regional Characteristics

“…Creative thinking skills are not just talents possessed by certain people, but are skills that can be trained and developed (Nggermanto, 2015). Therefore, creative thinking skills can be trained and developed continuously by involving students actively in learning without distinguishing students' abilities (De Bono, 2007;Doron, 2017;Lucchiari, Sala, & Vanutelli, 2019). On that basis, developing the ability to think creatively in students is not an impossible thing, but a very rational thing to be done by educators in each lesson.…”