Can critical thinking and creativity skills ever be improved?

This thesis examines whether P4C can develop creativity and critical thinking. However, whether these skills are malleable by any intervention can be questioned. There should be evidence that there are other interventions which can improve these skills before examining whether P4C can change them.

Critical thinking skills can be considered malleable because there is currently evidence suggesting interventions which can improve students’ critical thinking skills at all education levels, including primary education (Abrami et al., 2008). Some

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evidence focused on the development of these skills in college students (Kong et al., 2014; Niu, Behar-Horenstein & Garvan, 2013). However, as Lipman suggested, it is also important to focus on the development of these skills in students of younger ages. Furthermore, as Abrami et al. (2008) reported, studies who engage primary school students as participants are these which report bigger effect sizes compared to those with college students. This finding may suggest that these skills can be easier improved in younger ages. Studies have already examined the impact of different interventions on primary schools students. For example, a recent study with students in Hong Kong reported that effective group work had a positive impact on primary schools pupils’ critical thinking (Fung, 2014).

Concerning the evidence about creativity development, there are some recently published studies which suggest a change in creativity performance after specific interventions. For example, a study in New Zealand examined the impact of project- based learning on creativity (Storer, 2018). Grade 4 students participated in this study. The intervention lasted only for six weeks and only 90 participants were involved in the study. The impact of the programme on fluency, originality, elaboration, abstractness of title and resistance to premature closure was measured. The definition of creativity used in that intervention matches to the working definition of this thesis. I used the reported means and standard deviation in the pre-test and post-test in order to calculate the effect sizes between the groups (which were not reported by the researchers) and I found that positive effect sizes were found in most of the areas (fluency = -0.1, originality and resistance to premature closure = 0.1, Abstractness of title = 0.06, whilst the effect size of elaboration was calculated as 0.5). Therefore, small or medium positive impact was found in some creativity areas, which suggests that these skills can be developed.

A different study also offered evidence that the Skills4Genius Programme can lead to creativity enhancement for the intervention group. Positive effect sizes were reported for elaboration, originality, premature closure and abstractness to titles (Santos et al., 2017). No clear finding was reported in relation to the impact on fluency. The intervention in this study lasted for five months. However, the sample was smaller than the previously mentioned study with 22 participants in the experimental group and 18 in the control group.

See and Kokotsaki (2016) also identified some studies which suggested that arts education can enhance students’ creativity. The researchers expressed concerns

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about specific weaknesses in the design of the studies. There is also evidence that interventions improve the creativity of adults. For example, a study with 53 female students showed that the engagement in game making led to increase in divergent thinking scores (Gallagher & Grimm, 2018). Another example comes from a recently published study in United Arab Emirates reported that a training on creativity, which was not discipline-specific, enhanced the creativity of the participants (Vally et al., 2019). However, this study did not have a comparison group, so its research design is weak to establish a causal relationship between the intervention implementation and the change in creativity scores.

To summarise, there is no consistency in the existing evidence to secure that these skills are malleable. Some of the evidence suggesting that these skills are malleable comes from short-term interventions with small sample. No rapid change would be expected in these skills and studies with a bigger sample are needed to establish that these skills are malleable. Considering potential publications bias, there might be a tendency for interventions to report some positive results. Therefore, it can be questionable to what extent the results of these studies are trustworthy and generalisable. However, since there is some available evidence which suggest that a difference in these skills could be expected after an implementation of an intervention, a similar result might occur after the implementation of the P4C intervention. This is an encouraging finding. Furthermore, it would be a very pessimistic approach for the education to accept that there are no interventions to improve students’ thinking skills. Even if there was no known intervention improving these skills, educational researchers should investigate this possibility because of the importance of these skills in later life.

3.6. Chapter Summary

This chapter discussed several definitions of critical thinking and creativity in order to support the two working definitions used in this thesis. The reasons why these two concepts are accepted as domain-independent were explained. Presenting working definitions for this thesis was crucial because the operationalisation of these concepts enabled their evaluation. Before concluding this chapter, it is also crucial to reiterate that the definitions used by this thesis are not exhaustive and they do not cover all the necessary elements of these two concepts. Hence, these definitions are not presented as the ideal definitions of these concepts. The definitions adopted by this thesis prioritised

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specific elements of these concepts which were judged significant and assessable. This prioritisation was important in order to design or use assessments which could fit the age and the concentration span of the students who participated in this research. Finally, this chapter showed that there is some evidence suggesting that students’ critical and creative skills can be developed following interventions.

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