Evaluation of creative powers' development programme for pre-school children

Learning under an adult’s supervision is one of the essential conditions for child development. For the benefit of a child’s innate liveliness and his spontaneous discovery of the world, and in order to promote individuality, there is a call for new teaching methods at schools and nursery schools. This, however, entails boards of competent teachers with the necessary knowlege and skills at enhancing their pupils’ creativity and inventivess. Polish Foundation of Children and Teenagers in Warsaw, given assistance by Bernard Van Leer Foundation, has already prepared and carried out an educational programme intended for ore-school teaching circles. The programme propagated new methods of teaching children aged from 3 to 6. The presented article shows the programme’s evaluation research conducted on children. The research tried to provide an answer to the following question: do heightened competence of pre-school teachers’ and implementation of the new programme for working with children affect children’s development. The subject of analysis heavily relied on the children-made works, such sa: a picture of a human being, a picture on a freely-chosen subject and a picture Urban-Jellen’s Creative Thinking Test. In the research procedure both model and inspection nursery schools were taken into account. In the model nursery schools the teachers participated in the educational programme, and, supposedly, implemented the new programme for working with children. In the inspected nursery schools the teachers worked under traditional guidelines for teaching. Research conducted in 1997 focused on 120 children from Lublin, Kielce and Ło´dz´: 60 from model institutions and 60 from the inspection ones (before teachers’ training). The research was subsequently continued in the consecutive years and finishhed up in 1999. Consequently, a very rich, empirical material was collected, comprising qualitative analyses of the assembled children’s works. In order to objectify the results, homogeneous (equal for all children) research conditions were closely followed, whereas the analyses (according to carefully worked out criteria) were all done by the author herself. Detailed analysis of the children-made works showed that there are differences between the children from model nursery schools and the inspection ones, in reference to constructing subject-based pictures. Similarly, the results of Creative Thinking Test significantly differed in the researched groups. In both cases the differences proved beneficial to the model schools children. Hence, the heightening of pre-school teachers’ level of competence and implementation of the new programme radically affect child development