Impact of Out-of-School Educational Environments on the Creative and Spatial Thinking Skills of Gifted Students

Abstract

The importance of educating gifted children is steadily increasing. The education of these pupils, who are seen as future of the societies, should be encounter to meet their needs. Our study aims to provide the desired learning oucomes without getting bored in fun environments with activities that will attract the attention and increase the motivation of gifted pupils in different locations outside the school. Additionally, it was studied whether there were differences about their creative and spatial thinking abilities with the activities prepared for this education. Our study was conducted using the ‘Pre-Test and Post-Test Experimental Design with Control Group’. Our sample involves experimental group of 21 pupils and control group of 21 pupils in the 6th grade studying at Konya Science and Art Center. The lesson plan of 8-week (32 hours) about museum-based art education was prepared and implemented for experimental group for 4 hours in a week. The control group was trained based on the National Education curriculum. The “Torrance Creativity Test” to decide creativity abilities and the “Mental Rotation Test and Paper Folding Test” to decide spatial thinking abilities were appealed before and after the experimental process for the experimental group, before and after curriculum works for the control group. The comparative effects of the discrepancies between the post-test and the pre-test results were examined to determine whether or not the program applied was effective in the development of students with the collected data. In our study, it was observed that museum visits and activities prepared by enriching the creative and spatial thinking abilities of gifted students were effective in improving students’ creative and spatial thinking abilities. When the experimental group students had fun with museum visits and activities, they concretized objects and reached the application area by seeing and touching. It was observed that the creativity abilities and spatial thinking abilities of the control group pupils could not be developed with classical educational plans.