Development And Experimental Research On Children 's Creativity Training Project

Empirical studies have illustrated that early childhood especially four to five years old is a critical period for creativity development (Wang,2005). Interventions aimed to cultivate young children’s creativity will do less for more in this period. Chinese Ministry of Education in 2012 published "The Learning and Development Guide for Three to Six Years Old Children" in which put emphasizes on the cultivation of young children’s creativity. Western countries put a lot of efforts in cultivating young children’s creativity, many intervention programs have been designed recent years, representative programs are Smogorzewska’s (2012,2014) intervention program about language creativity, Chronopoulou and Riga’s (2012) intervention program which integrate music and movement, Dziedziewicz, Oledzka and Karwowski’s (2013) intervention program about figural creativity, and Alfonso-Benlliure, Melendez and Garcia-Ballesteros’(2013) intervention program about play, etc. In comparison, Chinese research strength in this field is not so strong, only Wang (2007) and Liu (2012) have made some efforts.On account of some shortages of these mentioned creativity intervention programs and the weakness of Chinese research in this field, this study discussed the content and special features of young children’s creativity as well as other problems in young children’s creativity cultivation, designed a creativity intervention program to cultivate young children’s creativity. The program took Hu’s (Hu et al.,2011)Thinking Ability Structure Model as core theoretical reference and designed a three-level objective system including the general objective, dimensional objective and activity objective on the basis of Liu’s (2012) "Learn to Think" activity curriculum. According to spiral development principle, activity contents were selected from science, art, language, physics and cognition. The program includes two different training modules:basic thinking method training and integrated thinking method training. Basic thinking method training aims to train children’s basic thinking methods, such as observation, association, imagination, etc.; integrated thinking training aims to train higher-level of thinking methods, such as creating, problem finding, problem solving and scientific exploration, etc. The program in total have 40 activities (20 activities for mid-level classes,20 activities for high-level classes).Each activity follows a process of scenario establishing, questions proposing, initiative exploration, teamwork and idea exchanging, conclusion and reflecting, and application and transferring.To demonstrate the intervention’s effectiveness,186 children including two mid-level class and two high-level class were selected. Each level’s children were separated into three groups:experimental group, control group 1 and control group 2. Experimental group and control group 1 are in the same class while control group 2 is in another class. Seven month of intervention was conducted in experimental group while other two groups didn’t accept any intervention. Half a month before and after the intervention, all groups took the international acknowledged test of Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT).Participants with full data in both pretest and posttest were selected to analysis while the results indicated that the intervention program can efficiently facilitate young children’s creative thinking ability. This paper discussed the results and reflected the short comings of this research with some prospective solutions. Moreover, it also proposed some practical strategies and advices in conducting creativity intervention program.