The Influence of CoRT Creative Thinking Courses on Junior High School Students’ Creativity and Creative Performance

[[abstract]]The main purpose of this study was to design a set of CoRT creative thinking course based on Edward de Bono’s CoRT program for junior high school students and to investigate the impacts on junior high school students’ creativity and creative performance. A nonequivalent pretest-posttest experimental design was employed. The subjects of this study involved the students of three clubs.They were 7th grade students from a public junior high school in Taipei County. The students of the creative expert club were the experimental group. The students of the environmental skilled hand club were the controlled group one. The students of the table tennis club were the controlled group two. Instruments used were: (1) The New Tests of Creative Thinking; (2) The Test of Williams Divergent Feeling; (3) Creative toys performance assessment; (4) Students’ work; (5) Feedback questionnaire; (6) Teaching reflective journal; and (7) Interview outline from students in the experimental group. The collected data were analyzed by one-way ANCOVA and one-way ANOVA. The major findings of this study were concluded as follows: 1. The results of “The New Tests of Creative Thinking” (a)The performances of the creative expert club were significantly better than those of the table tennis club in verbal fluency, flexibility, and originality. (b)The performances of the creative expert club were significantly better than those of the environmental skilled hand club in verbal originality. There was no significant difference between the creative expert club and the environmental skilled hand club in verbal fluency and flexibility. (c)The performances of the creative expert club were significantly better than those of the table tennis club in figure fluency, originality, and elaboration. There was no significant difference between the creative expert club and the table tennis club in figure flexibility. (d)The performances of the creative expert club were significantly better than those of the environmental skilled hand club in figure fluency and originality. There was no significant difference between the creative expert club and the environmental skilled hand club in figure flexibility and elaboration. 2. The results of “The Test of Williams Divergent Feeling” There were no significant differences between the creative expert club, the environmental skilled hand club and the table tennis club in risk-taking, curiosity, imagination, and complexity. 3. The results of “Creative toys performance assessment” (a)The performances of the creative expert club were significantly better than those of the table tennis club in elaboration and total score. There was no significant difference between the creative expert club and the table tennis club in originality, appropriateness and meaning. (b)There were no significant differences between the creative expert club and the environmental skilled hand club in originality, elaboration, appropriateness, meaning, and total score. 4. The learning reactions in the experiment group students who accept CoRT creative thinking course were positive. Finally, according to the results of this study , it offered the suggestions of studying further in the future, and the references of teaching CoRT creative thinking course.