A Study of the Effect of Selected Teaching Strategies on Creative Thinking Ability and Reading Comprehension

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine if the creative thinking skills of third and fourth grade students could be enhanced by the use of selected teaching strategies designed to stimulate fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration. A second purpose was to investigate the relationship between creative thinking and reading. The subjects were third and fourth graders who were all members of the same racially integrated, homogeneously grouped classroom in an urban elementary school. A control group and a treatment group were formed. Both groups were found to be statistically equivalent in reading ability and creative thinking ability when pretested with the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) and the Metropolitan Achievement Test. The treatment group participated in three twenty-five minute sessions per week for eight weeks designed to develop the skills of fluent thinking, flexible thinking, original thinking and elaborative thinking. Each lesson began with a relaxed attention activity. The control group received no instruction in creative thinking. They spent a comparable amount of language arts time listening to and reading literature. At the end of the treatment period, both groups were post-tested using the TTCT and the Metropolitan Achievement Test. The posttest results showed no significant differences in creative thinking ability between the treatment group and the control group. A significant correlation was found between reading comprehension and fluency for the treatment group.