The Effect of “Creative Thinking Teaching” on Creativity, Writing Ability and Writing Interest of Junior High School.

[[abstract]]The main purposes of this study were to integrate the creative methods in composition teaching and to design a “Creative Thinking Teaching Composition Program” which was suitable for junior high school students. This study aimed to investigate the effects of the course in writing teaching on the creativity, writing ability and writing interest of the students in junior high school. A nonequivalent pretest-posttest experimental design was employed. The subjects of this study involved the students of two classes. They were 7th grade students from a public junior high school in Taipei City. “Creative Thinking Teaching Composition Program” was implemented in the experimental group, while the control group was taught in the traditional way. Instruments used were: (1) Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking; (2) Scale of Writing Performance; (3) Scale of Creative Writing Performance; (4) Writing Interest Questionnaire; (5) End of The Curriculum Feedback Questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed by one-way ANCOVA. The major findings of this study were concluded as follows: I. Creativity The students in the experimental group got more significant improvements in Fluency, Flexibility, Originality, and the total score than those in the control group on Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking Test. II. Writing performance The students in the experimental group made no significant improvements in their writing ability, including grammar, contents, organization and the total score. III. Creative Writing Performance The students in the experimental group made no significant improvements in their creative writing ability. IV. Writing Interest The students in the experimental group made no significant improvements in their writing interest questionnaires. V. End of The Curriculum Feedback Questionnaire Analyzed from the end of the curriculum feedback questionnaires, there were over sixty percent of the experiment group students who accept “Creative Thinking Teaching Composition Program” were positive. The methods which the research used were useful for students’ creativity. Even though it can’t promote the writing ability of students in force, it is generally positive with the writing class in the junior high school. It is our hope that the results of this study may offer the suggestions for further studies in composition teaching and references for teaching creative thinking teaching composition program.