Marharyta Kovtun
Vinnytsia Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi State Pedagogical University
Scientific Supervisor: V.V. Zhukovska, PhD
SKILLS FOR CRITICAL AND CREATIVE THINKING IN PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS
Today, the primary goal of education is to teach thinking skills rather than reading, writing, or math because these are the skills needed for sustainability and lifelong education in addition to basic education, as well as qualified problem solving, scientific literacy, and technological literacy. So, educational programs designed for individuals with giftedness and average ability should take these talents into consideration. It is true that learners encounter a variety of real-world issues throughout the lifelong process. The objective is to help students develop their creative and critical skills. [4]
Critical and Creative Thinking Skills
The full range of cognitive processes that people use in response to a particular object, problem, or circumstance can be characterized as creative thinking. Alternatively, it can be described as a type of effort directed at a specific event and the problem based on the capabilities of the individuals. When confronted with such circumstances, individuals make an effort to employ their creativity, intelligence, insight, and ideas. Additionally, they attempt to offer a genuine and original design, generate various hypotheses, and solve the issue with the aid of discovering and locating new applications, whereby each individual realizes his or her knowledge deficits and attempts to bridge this gap while obtaining new perspectives by looking at the issue from a number of angles with the aid of making unusual connections and taking risks based on their insights to produce. [6]
In general, problem solving and critical thinking are linked to creative thinking. Indeed, synthesising, articulation, and imagination are the three components of creative thinking, and they have the following characteristics.
Synthesising: This dimension covers a variety of actions, such as making use of comparable reasoning, extrapolating the main idea from minor details, and offering creative and genuine suggestions for resolving issues. Articulation: It entails combining old and new knowledge or broadening the current knowledge with the aid of the new one, establishing unlikely connections to develop genuine solutions, and turning abstract ideas into tangible objects by using one’s imagination and available resources. Imagination: This dimension involves creating connections between sound and reliable ideas, offering flexible ways of thinking with the aid of imagination, and developing new insights during the idea-generation process. [1]
While we mention it as students’ application of prior information and revising it after the valuation process, critical thinking is defined as coming to a decision in accordance with the goals and knowledge. Critical thinking generally refers to the capacity to examine situations, circumstances, or ideas with attention, to comment, make decisions, research the accuracy and validity of knowledge using standards of logic and mind. According to Howard, Tang, and Austion, this higher order thinking skill offers the chance to rationally reason with existing knowledge or scenarios to fill in gaps and fix errors in order to achieve optimal conditions. [3]
Identifying and evaluating the reliability of information sources, signaling prior knowledge, drawing connections, and drawing conclusions are all examples of critical thinking skills. The following is a succinct overview of the general traits of critical thinking: suspecting and reasoning; examining circumstances from several angles and dimensions; to be open to innovations and changes; to view ideas objectively; to be open-minded; to think critically; to pay close attention to details. Benefits of critical thinking include people who are critical thinkers analyse information freely and independently, who don’t act mindlessly and may state the issue explicitly. [2]
PBL and critical thinking
In order to achieve the required learning objectives, problem-based learning (PBL), a pedagogical technique, uses examples and problems as a starting point. In fact, it’s one of the most inventive teaching strategies in educational history, where students are given a real-world or poorly structured problem to answer as part of the learning process. This strategy involves developing new knowledge on top of prior knowledge. During the problem-solving process, it is hoped that students’ problem-solving, self-directed, collaborative learning, and motivation levels will increase. In PBL, critical and creative thinking are combined. Multiple thinking skills, the ability to come up with diverse answers and suggest potential solutions, analytical thinking and the ability to consider ideas objectively all lead to creativity. The generation of quality inventions, the sustainability of education, and creative and critical thinking are all enhanced by one another. [5]
In conclusion, these talents need to be fostered critically during the instructional design process if we want to raise learners who may become future young scientists. Notably, under the problem-based learning method, it should not be ignored that learner and context analysis, organization of instructional objectives, development of instructional strategy, or assessment approaches become separate in the instructional design process. [3]
References
- Augustine, N. R. Educating the gifted. Psychological Science in The Public Interest, 2011, 12(1), 1-2
- Demirel, Ö. Egitimde Program Gelistirme: Kuramdan Uygulamaya. Ankara: Pegem Academy Publications. 2012
- Howard, L. W., Tang, T., & Austin, M. J. Teaching critical thinking skills: Ability, motivation, intervention, and the Pygmalion effect. Journal of Business Ethics, 2015, 128, 133-147
- Runco, M. A: Creativity theories and themes: Research, development and practice. (2nd ed.) USA: Elsevier Inc. 2014
- Tortop, H.S., & Ozek, N. The meaningful field trip in project based learning; the solar energy and its usage areas topic. H. U. Journal of Education, 2013, 44, 300-307
- Young, M. H. & Balli, S. J. Gifted and talented education: student and parent perspectives. Gifted Child Today, 2014, 37(4), 236-246