The effect of creative and critical thinking based laboratory applications on creative and logical thinking abilities of prospective teachers

People have to improve their creative and logical thinking in order to develop technological improvements and utilize them in today’s continuously changing and developing world. These two abilities are necessary to create new products and to find effective and productive solutions for potential problems as the world develops. The individuals who are key in determining development of the world and have high-levels of creative and logical thinking abilities may provide better life for their societies; therefore, concepts of logical thinking and creative thinking have importance for the scientific world and have still been used in different fields (Koray, 2003). To know the meanings of the creative thinking and logical thinking may be useful to determine aims of applications in education.

Creative thinking has been considered as an intuitive process. The components of creative thinking include understanding incomplete parts, gaps in intuitively getting knowledge, problems and difficulties, to conjecture about these parts, gaps, difficulties and problems, to set hypotheses about them, to test the hypotheses, to compare the results of test, to set and evaluate new hypotheses if needed and lastly, to explain the final results (Saeki et al. 2001:25). The ability of creative thinking has an important role for many scientific applications, especially when used for setting the hypotheses and problems and for constructing an action plan to resolve them (Koray, 2003). The process of the creative thinking is hard to evaluate and has a complex structure requiring deep experiences, to be open-hearted, to accept ideas, to experience new approaches, to be curious, to have high level self-confidence, to be dissipated and have high energy, to be an idealist, to like loneliness, to be humorous, to obtain knowledge about aesthetical artistic interests, to behave suddenly and to be interested in new, mysterious and complex things (Özden, 2004:174-175, Enger & Yager, 1998:10). Özden (2004:176-178) stated that certain skills contribute to creative thinking in literature. These skills include fluidity, flexibility, originality, sensitivity to problems, ability to determine problems, to imagine deeply, to be childlike, to think analogically, the ability to evaluate situations, to be analytical, to synthesize anything well, to have ability to transform something, to go beyond the common boundaries, to think intuitively, to make predictions, follow-through on job completing, concentration on goals, logical thinking, ability to provide extraordinary conjunctions, to be spontaneous, to be courageous against uncertainty and to have autonomy. In the existing literature, there are some studies showing the effectiveness of creativity programs on development of the creative thinking ability (Parnes and Reese, 1970; Sandwith, 1978). Studies on creativity based applications in labs are hard to find in the existing literature. There is one study on creative and critical thinking based lab applications with the dependent variables out of creativity (Koray et al. 2007). Therefore, there is a gap in experimental studies of science lab activities.

As the other ability focused in this study, logical thinking as an aim of higher order education is mirror of thought that come about in formation of operations in child. The essential characteristic is to be operational and extend the action scope through internalization (Piaget, 1950; 30, 37). In addition, logical thinking comprises both thinking about thought and reversal association between what is possible and what is real (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958; 341). Logical thinking is the highest form of thinking for Piaget, and in his stages of cognitive development, this type of thinking develops towards higher stages. He showed the development of logical thinking as in concrete operational stage, but he made discrimination between stages of logical thinking on concrete objects and multifactor situations. Therefore, development of logical thinking is explained in concrete and formal operational periods beginning from 7-8 ages to older ages (Gredler, 2005). In the literature on science lab activities, it is a difficult task to find critical and creative thinking based experimental studies including logical thinking abilities as dependent variables. In addition, there is only one study in the national literature on the variables out of logical thinking (Koray et. al, 2007)