Creative interpersonal problem solving program: Igniting creativity in elementary students

Abstract

Improving problem solving skills of elementary students would facilitate their confrontation with everyday conflict situations in this fast-changing world. Because of the importance of acquiring problem solving skills for young students, a creative interpersonal problem solving training program was developed, and its effectiveness on creativity of the elementary students was evaluated. The design of the study was semi-experimental with pretest-posttest and control group. Among 5 different classes including 84 students from 3 different all-girl schools in north Tehran, 2 classes with 49 students were randomly assigned as experimental and 2 classes with 35 students were assigned as the control groups. The experiment group participated in the creative interpersonal problem solving program, while the control group did not receive any treatment. Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (Torrance, 1990) was used to evaluate creative thinking skills of the participants. The obtained data were analyzed using Repeated Measures Analysis of Variance. The findings showed significant differences (p<0.05) between the experimental and the control groups in all subscales of creativity. At the end, applying creative interpersonal problem solving program for improving interpersonal problem solving and creativity in elementary girls was discussed. Discussions as well as suggestions for future research are presented.