Roles of parents in enhancing children’s creative thinking skills

Abstract

Since creative thinking is an essential requirement in today’s societies, educational institutions have to make some reforms in order to prepare next generation according to the needs of the societies such as giving more emphasis on creative thinking. The main aims of this paper are to reveal the parents’ opinions about the creative thinking skills, to teach parents the meaning of creative thinking, and to teach parents to create home environments that enhance creative thinking skills. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods was employed. Pretest- posttest experimental design was used and qualitative data were collected by an open-ended questionnaire. A 10-hour parent education seminar was used as an intervention for the experimental group. The participants of the research were 80 parents (40 parents in the experimental group, 40 parents in the control group) from a primary school in Ankara, Turkey. Content analysis was applied to analyze the qualitative data. The pretest results have indicated that there were no differences between parents groups according to the knowledge level about the creative thinking. According to posttest results, the knowledge levels of parents in the experimental group who were given 10-hour parent education seminar were increased. However, the knowledge levels of the parents who have not given any education in the control group, were remained the same. Besides, experimental group parents have more information about creating home environments that enhance creativity rather than control group parents. According to the findings, parents' perspectives in the experimental group on the creative thinking skills have changed after the parent education seminar. However, the perspectives of the parent in the control group have not changed.