High-school students believe school physics helps in developing logical but not creative thinking: Active learning can change this idea

Abstract

This study is based on two exploratory questions with the aim of determining the relative effectiveness of two different student activities, called Reading, Presenting and Questioning (RPQ) and Experimenting and Discussing (ED), in changing students' perceptions and attitudes about the impact of physics learning on the development of logical and creative thinking. One-semester of data from this high school project for RPQ group (91 students) showed a shift of 11% in their attitudes related to the development of logical thinking, while student attitudes about the development of creative thinking showed a shift of 20.9%. The results for the ED group (85 students) showed a considerable shift in positive attitudes about the role of physics in the development of logical thinking of 31.7% while student attitudes towards the development of creative thinking made a ​​significant progress of 36.4%. These results indicate that both forms of active learning improve student perceptions about the impact of teaching physics on the development of logical and creative thinking, although students in ED group show much bigger improvements.