Information Processing and Creative Thinking Abilities of Residential and Non-Residential School Children

Atasi Mohanty

doi:10.1177/2158244015611452

Abstract

This study attempts to assess and compare the residential and non-residential schoolchildren in information-processing skills and creative thinking abilities. A sample of 80 children from Classes 5 and 7 were selected from two types of schools, residential/ashram (02) and non-residential/formal schools (02) in Bolpur subdivision of West Bengal in India where the medium of instruction is Bengali language/mother-tongue. All the children were individually administered the PASS (Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, Successive), Stroop, Matching Familiar Figure Test (MFFT-20), and creative thinking tasks. The residential school children were found to perform better both in information processing and creative thinking tasks. The developmental trend could not be clearly observed due to small sample size, but with increasing age, children were using better processing strategies. Due to ashram environment, creative pedagogy, and various co-curricular activities, the residential school children were found to be more creative than their formal school counterparts. Moreover, some significant positive correlations were found among information processing skills and creative thinking dimensions.

Highlights

To quote a few traditional researchers, Neisser (1967) defined the concept cognition as a study of how people encode, structure, store, retrieve, use, or otherwise learn knowledge. Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) in their human information processing model have viewed that learning and memory processes are discontinuous and multi-staged, and any new information before being stored are manipulated by our information processing/memory system
The “Levels of Processing” theory developed by Craik and Lockhart (1972) disagreed with the three-stage serial processing model of Atkinson and Shiffrin and stated that any information from the environment is being processed at multiple levels simultaneously depending on its characteristics, attention, and meaningfulness
As the findings show, the ashram/residential schoolchildren performed significantly better than the formal/non-residential schoolchildren in all the information processing and creative thinking tasks

Summary

Introduction

To quote a few traditional researchers, Neisser (1967) defined the concept cognition as a study of how people encode, structure, store, retrieve, use, or otherwise learn knowledge. Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) in their human information processing model have viewed that learning and memory processes are discontinuous and multi-staged, and any new information before being stored are manipulated by our information processing/memory system. Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) in their human information processing model have viewed that learning and memory processes are discontinuous and multi-staged, and any new information before being stored are manipulated by our information processing/memory system. Their famous stage theory model identified three types of memory based on its processing stages that is, sensory memory, short-term/working memory, and long-term memory. The “Schema theory of Information Processing and Memory” developed by Rumelhart (1980) proposes that information is stored in multiple locations throughout the brain in the form of networks of connections; units of memory are connections rather than any concrete representation of previous information. The developmental perspective of information processing as proposed by Flavell, Miller, and Miller (2002) emphasizes that increased

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Conclusion