Effects of Mind Mapping Studies on the Creativity Skills of 60 to 72-month-old Children

Abstract

Along with the needs of the 21st century, flexible thinking and creativity skills in the education of young children began to gain importance. One of the techniques for supporting the skills of children to think flexibly and generate new ideas and the ability to integrate their knowledge, is motivation through mind mapping. This research which used a pre-test - post-test control group experimental model aimed to examine the effect of the mind mapping program, developed for 60-72-month-old children, on their creativity skills. The research was conducted in two classrooms in preschool education, located in the Kadıköy district of İstanbul. The study group consisted of 47 randomly assigned children of which 26 were experimental group and 21 to the control group. of w The Creative Thinking Skills of the Hybrid Creativity was used as pre-test and post-test measurement of the creativity skills of the children in the research project. Following the pre-tests, members of experimental group were first subjected to five mind mapping studies for the purpose of learning. These studies were carried out once a week and completed within five weeks. Later, for a total of 10 weeks, the children prepared individual mind maps about various subjects. During the week, the children prepared their mind maps at playtime. Post-tests were conducted at the end of the practices, and data was collected. Upon collection of the data, the t-test was implemented on the independent group in order to discover whether there is an important difference in the findings for the experimental and control group through the use of the pre-test of the Creative Thinking Skills of the Hybrid Creativity. After analysis, the difference between the arithmetic means of the groups was found to be significant (t=2.29; p<.05). In order to assess the possible effect of the difference on the post-test a single factor covariance analysis (ANCOVA) was carried out. Means were compared with paired sample t-test and independent samples t-test. The former test was used to determine whether or not there is a significant difference between the mean of the pre-test and post-test scores of the Creative Thinking Skills of the Hybrid Creativity applied for the experimental and control groups. Independent samples were subjected to the t-test to determine whether or not there was a significant difference between the mean of the post-test scores. Lastly, one-factor analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was performed to find out that the difference between the post-test means arising from the independent variable application or the difference between the pre-tests revealed in comparison. It was understood as a result of the analyses that creativity skills of both experimental and control groups increased. However, the covariance analysis conducted to test the significance of the increase in arithmetic means of the experimental and control groups by keeping the pre-test results constant showed that the children who created mind mapping progressed further than the children who did not create mind mapping. It was concluded in the research that mind mapping is an effective strategy for development of preschool children’s creative skills.