The divergent thinking of basic skills of sciences process skills of life aspects on natural sciences subject in Indonesian elementary school students

Findings of present study show that the percentage score of all indicators indicates that divergent thinking of basic skills in SPS on life aspects achieved by the students of grade 4, 5, and 6 varied for each indicator. Some scores are relatively high or low for a certain aspect of basic skills in SPS. This result is in contrast to to the statement of teachers reported on the research by Subali & Mariyam (2013). In this case, most of the teachers stated that they did not teach creativity to their students. This condition may be caused by the teachers’ inadequate understanding about how to develop student’s creativity.

Teachers concentrate more on developing learners in order that they can understand the concept and automatically develops their convergent thinking skills. Teachers will seldom provide questions that required divergent answer (Croom & Stair, 2005). The second possibility is that there are some aspects of basic and process skills that cannot be taught easily to the students. Another cause is that teachers focus only on concepttual understanding as a target in their teaching. As a result, creativity is not the main teaching target. Whereas, integrating creativity into a standards-based system needs to consider the learning needs of talented learners (Burke, 2007).

The findings show that the percentage of student scores against the total score indicating that grade 4 students attain the lowest achievements, lower than Grade 5 students and grade 6 students who get the highest scores, except in one indicator of all aspects of basic skills (indicator number 3 of movement manipulation skills: find him/herself the things that cause errors in using a thermometer to measure and observe the symptoms of living things life in Table 6). This means that the learning outcomes will be better in line with the higher grade levels. However, with reference to lowest achievement in a particular indicator, it can be interpreted that the teacher's role in developing the divergent thinking skill may not be optimal. This is probably because the sixth grade teachers focus more on the achievement of the National Examination. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct further research.

Most teachers are worried about the statement that teaching creativity to their students who have low academic potential is recommended on the grounds that students encounter some difficulties to do. However, such a perpective is not totally true. According to Ferrando et al. (2005), smart students are not always creative. In support of this, Cromie (2007) strongly urges that not all studies show a correlation between students’ IQ and creativity. Moreover, Rawat et al. (2012) argue that the development of creativity is closely related to the development of skills to form a corresponding consideration in different situations. Therefore, the development of creativity should be taught as early as possible.

Teachers do not realize that the development of creativity in natural sciences teaching aims at directing learners to perform opened-discovery or inquiry or do the related tasks. In this case, teachers are supposed to develop student’s thinking in order that they can perform logical thinking creatively (Kind & Kind, 2007). When phenomena and problems as part of teaching natural sciences are found at home and in the community contexts, different students build on their everyday experience and language to make connections among school science and home and community (Januszyk, Miller, & Lee, 2016).

It is realized that students still show low achievements. This evidence is closely related to the low reading habits conducted by elementary school students. This reading habit correlates to the achievement of the divergent and convergent thinking skills. Maerten-Rivera et al. (2010) quoated by Linderholm, Therriault, & Kwon (2014) state that among elementary school children a correlation between reading and science scores on a high stakes test was notably high (r = 0.78, p < 0.01). Added to this, Addis, Pan, Musicaro, and Schacter (2014) show that the divergent thinking is significantly associated with the amount of episodic detail for imagined future events. Moreover, while age is significantly associated with imagined episodicdetail, this effect is strongly related to age-related changes in episodic retrieval rather than divergent thinking. Jones and Estes (2015) also show that the individual differences in convergent and divergent thinking may uniquely explain variation in analogical reasoning ability. Therefore, the low achievement of divergent thinking skills of SPS may inhibit students to deal with imagination and establish their thinking skills in verbal analogy.

Another finding shows that the students give one correct answer easier than giving two correct answers in almost all of items. This is indicated by the score of thau-1 and thau-2 of items difficulty. This is in line with the asumption that if the students have divergent thinking, the second answer will be easier than the first one because they have got both answers. Also, this is similar to the idea of Diakidoy and Constantinou in 2000-2001 referring to the idea of Guilford cited by Kind and Kind (2007) which states that smoothness aspect is one of the characteristics of divergent thinking skill.

It is evident that the study of natural science and social science is not substantially different. This suggests that the scientists’ views about the nature of science are not related to their scientific disciplines (Bayir, Cakici, & Ertas, 2014). This means that the results of the research can be explored to develop the divergent thinking skill test to investigate students’ mastery in divergent thinking skills on SPS in the sosial sciences.

Ideally, creativity learning must use an applied learning model and an ideational learning model (Dettmer, 2006: 70-78). Teachers can also stimulate the children to be creative by giving example of how to perform (a) substituting/replacing, (b) combining, (c) adapting, (d) modifying, (e) adding, (f) putting something for another use, (g) eliminating or reducing and (h) reconstructing or reversing (Michalko, 2000).