The Influence of Creative Thinking Teaching on the Student Learning Effectiveness in Introduction to Business for Vocational High School

[[abstract]]Abstract The study was to explore the influence of creative thinking teaching of Introduction to Business for vocational high school on the students’ creative thinking ability, creative problem solving ability and the scores of Introduction to Business. It’s also to analyze if the academic performance would influence the effectiveness of teaching. This study adopted the “nonequivalent pretest-posttest control group design” in the quasi-experiment designs. The subjects of the study were the students of the 1st grade students of National Chung-li Home Economic and Commercial Vocational High School in school year 2005. Two classes were picked up randomly. One of them was the experimental group, who was applied by the creative thinking teaching; while the other one was the control group with conventional lecturing teaching. The experiment lasted for 10 weeks. The tools used in this study included: （1）Test of “Creative Thinking”developed by Wu Jing-Jin, （2）Torrance Test of Creative Thinking in 1975, （3）Test of “Creative Problem Solving Ability” by Cheng Shang-Hsiu, （4）Lesson plans, study sheets and learning reaction questionnaire developed by the researcher. The test results were analysis in by two-way multivariate analysis of covariance. The score differences of Introduction to Business were analyzed by one-way multivariate analysis of covariance. The findings of the study were as follows: 1. The students of the experimental group were not significantly better than the students of the control group in the creative thinking ability scores of graphic and language. 2. The students of the experimental group were not significantly better than the students of the control group in the scores of creative problem-solving ability. 3. The enhancement effectiveness of the creative thinking ability in graphic and language didn’t have significant differences students’ academic performance. 4. The enhancement effectiveness of creative problem-solving ability didn’t have significant differences with students’ academic performance. 5. The average final exam scores of Introduction to Business for the students of the experimental group were not significantly better than the students of the control group. 6. The reaction of the students of the experimental group about experimental courses was positive and favorable. Key word: Introduction to Business for vocational high school、Creative thinking teaching 、Learning effectiveness