Award Date

August 2019

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Educational Psychology & Higher Education

First Committee Member

E. Michael Nussbaum

Second Committee Member

Lori Olafson

Third Committee Member

Stefani Relles

Fourth Committee Member

Hasan Deniz

Number of Pages

254

Abstract

This study investigated the effectiveness of the 3eT instructional model designed by Hong (Hong, 2012a; Hong, O'Neil, Drobick, & Beisel, 2013) that focused on increasing students' creative-thinking ability. 120 seventh-graders in China participated in the study. Participants were randomly assigned to the experimental or the control group. They learned a segment of a science curriculum unit with instructional materials developed based on the 3eT model which aimed to encourage students to use creative thinking techniques.

Patterns of students' perceptions of a creative person were compared between the experimental group and the control group. Content analyses of students' narrative responses elicited five themes: Thinking Ability, Personality, Motivation, Intelligence, and Skills. In general, both the control and the experimental groups provided similar results for the five themes. However, Fisher's exact tests indicated that students in the experimental group proposed more concepts related to "Divergent thinking," "Like to conducting experiments and research," and "Having special talents," which were some of the key features that the 3eT instructional model had emphasized during the training.

The MANOVA tests indicated that significant differences were found in the combined creative-thinking scores for three TIPS items. The follow-up ANOVA tests indicated significant differences between groups on all three dependent variables (fluency, flexibility, and originality) for the TIPS1. There were significant differences on originality mean scores across all three TIPS items. In addition, the results of the current study did not support the claim that the 3eT instructional model affected students' science achievement scores.

The current study provided a practical and effective way that creative-thinking techniques could be integrated into the 3eT instructional model and be delivered in the regular classroom curriculum.

Keywords

Creative Thinking; Creativity Instructional Model; Experimental Design; Science Achievement; Science Education

Disciplines

Education | Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research | Educational Psychology

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/


Share

COinS