Analysis of Science Teacher Candidates’ Relation between Scientific Creative Thinking Skills, Creative Problem Solving and Project Development Skills

Abstract

The research aims to determine the “relationship between the scientific creative thinking skills and creative problem solving and project development skills of candidate science teachers.” The research was performed with 24 teacher candidates in the control group and 24 teacher candidates in the experimental group in the second class of the Department of Science Teaching in a university in Istanbul Province. In the experimental group of the research, the laboratory program to be designed by the researchers on the basis of scientific discussion and research; and in the control group, the conventionally designed laboratory program were applied for 14 weeks. The research data was gained through “Self-Assessment for Creativity Questionnaire” to be developed by Raudsepp [28] and adapted by Sungur [30] into Turkish with the reliability value by Gülel [11]; two projects which were “the kite project”, “bridge project from spaghetti macaroni” and “personal interviews”. The conclusions to be reached by the research are in favour of the experimental group and the last application. While it was found that the project development processes of the candidate teachers in the experiment group had an important impact on their scientific creativity, the positive opinions of the candidate teachers were also found.