The Influence Of Critical Thinking On Creative Problem Solving

Innovation refers to the process that found new rules, put forward a new method,create new products, new results, solving new problems,through breaking the original scope of knowledge and the observation of existing things, analysis, synthesis,reasoning, imagination.It can be divided into three stages: preparation, creation and perfection,during each stage,both creative thinking and critical thinking are needed.In order to explore the influence of critical thinking on creative problem solving,critical thinking in this study is defined as follows:Critical thinking refers to thinking from different angles to solve the problem, especially on the opposite side of the problem situation or attribute.The creative problem solving tasks we used are the task of the non ordinary use of the divergent thinking task and the prototype Heuristic Task.This study is divided into three experiments, before each experiment,the subjects should fill out the CCTDI questionnaire.The purpose of Experiment 1 is to explore the training of critical thinking itself, whether it can improve the ability of critical thinking.The experiment is a single factor two level design,and is divided into the control group and the sample training group,using "pre-CT training andpost-test" experimental paradigm. The subjects are asked to question on a given material and then write down their reasons.The fluency and uniqueness of the cause are used as dependent variables.The results show that there is no significant difference between the experimental group and control group at pre-test, because there is no difference in CCTDI scores between the two groups, so it can be considered that it was the training of critical thinking that leaded to the improvement of the ability of Uniqueness.That is to say, the training of critical thinking itself can improve the ability of critical thinking.And then the experiment 2 and Experiment 3 are designed.Experiment 2 aims to explore whether critical thinking training can improve the ability of divergent thinking.This experiment is a single factor 3 level design,and is divided into control group, sample training group and strategy training group,using "critical thinking training- presenting items and their general use- writing answers" experimental paradigm.Uniqueness, flexibility, fluency scores for the unusual use of items are used to be denpendent variables.The results show that the control group and sample group, sample group and strategy group have significant differences in the uniqueness of the score, but the difference between control group and strategy group was not significant. So experiment 2 shows that the use of critical thinking training can improve the ability of divergent thinking.Experiment 3 is designed to explore whether critical thinking training can improve the ability of prototype inspired creative problem solving.The experiment is a single factor 3 level design, the independent variable is whether to carry on the critical thinking training,and is also divided into control group, sample training group and strategy training group,using the multi- multi experimental paradigm of "critical thinking training- prototype learning- prototype recognition- solve new problems”.The dependent variables are the scores of prototype recognition, the prototype heuristic rate, the problem solving rate.The results shows that there is no significant difference in the prototype of the recognition results among the three groups,while in the prototype heuristic rate, the problem solving rate,the difference between control group and strategy group are significant, but the difference between the sample group and the strategy group is not significant.Therefore, the experiment 3 shows that critical thinking training can help to extract the key information more quickly, and to solve the problem more effectively.Combining the results of the 3 experiments,we can draw the conclusions of this study as follows:(1)Critical thinking ability can be improved through the training itself;(2)The training of critical thinking has a significant impact on the two different types of creative problem solving, which are divergent thinking and prototype elicitation.For divergent thinking,using the training sample has the best effect, as for heuristic prototype, both sample training and strategy training can improve the success rate of problem solving;...