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Asia-Pacific Forum
on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 10, Issue 1, Article 2
(June, 2009) |
The result of the study is an indication of the effectiveness of the applications based on critical and creative thinking. In fact, the critical thinking and creative thinking as higher-order thinking abilities are related to many important variables such as age, cognitive development, field of the study, etc. (Lin, 2004). The students in this study are at the stage of formal thinking so; they are able to think at the abstract level as a higher-order form of logical thinking. Creative and critical thinking also requires frequent logical thinking due to its more complex structure and products (Garrison & Archer 2000; de Bono, 1970). The applications based on this kind of thinking should increase the level of logical thinking due to the processes experienced by students engaged in creative and critical thinking based applications. This study showed the expected result occurred with a moderate level practical significance. The laboratory is the most important area for application in science education. The inquiry and other activities related to science processes include the logic of science as a form of logical thinking. Therefore, laboratories might also provide a rich context for using logical thinking together with creative and critical thinking abilities. As higher order levels of thinking, creative and critical thinking are helpful to reach to deeper understanding for scientists and so they increase effectiveness of laboratory to learn science related logical thinking as found in this study. Previous literature is consistent with this study. Parnes and Reese (1970), in their study with high school students, found that students’ creativity increased significantly after participation in creativity based program. Again, Sandwith’s (1978) study of college students demonstrated that short term creativity applications effectively increased participants’ creativity scores. Sungur (1988), in Turkey, showed that a creative problem solving program was significantly effective in increasing problem solving abilities of university students. The increase in problem solving ability as a process for using logical thinking might be supportive evidence for this study. Jackson (2000) stated that critical thinking ability was an effective factor for mathematical problem solving that is an area requiring frequent use of logical thinking. As found in the literature, this study supported the idea that creative and critical thinking based laboratory applications, as tested on the experimental group, are more effective than the traditional laboratory activities in improving logical and creative thinking abilities.
The importance of the results of this study are due to the effectiveness of the research design to establish a cause-effect relationship and establishing variables used in preparing activities. Creativity and critical thinking are the two most important higher-order thinking abilities. In science labs, the development of such abilities might contribute to many other skills, such as logical thinking and science process skills as previously demonstrated by other studies (Koray et al. 2007). Considering the new constructivist curriculum, it can be said that creative and critical thinking based applications will become more concrete for teachers because of these studies.
