The Impact of a Sterinberg Theory-Based Training Program on Secondary School Students' Development of Critical and Creative Thinking Skills

Abstract

This study aimed to test the impact of a training program based on Sternberg's theory of problem solving on the development of critical and creative thinking skills among secondary school students, using a semi-experimental approach. The sample consisted of 70 students from the first grade of literary secondary school at Al-Baraa bin Malik Secondary School in the Directorate of Education of Naour in Jordan and was divided equally into two groups: experimental and control. The researcher built a training program based on Sternberg's theory of problem solving, known as the 'thinking circle', which consists of seven dimensions: feeling the problem, identifying the problem, representing the problem, choosing or inventing a solution strategy, effectively allocating resources for the solution, monitoring the problem solution, and evaluating the problem solution. The program was implemented during 11 six-week training sessions in the second semester of 2021–2022. The California 2000 Critical Thinking Scale and the Torrens Creative Thinking Scale (A) were also used in both the pre- and post-group assessment processes. To answer the questions of the study, it was found that the average performance of the groups was control and experimental for the pre-measurement of the critical thinking scale (10.55) and (10.75), respectively, while the average performance of the groups was on the dimensional measurement (11.67) and (17.78), respectively. To examine the differences in each of the arithmetic averages, the researcher used the analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) for performance for the total score of the critical thinking scale. The average performance of the control and experimental groups in the pre-evaluation of the creative thinking test was (71.68) and (70.35) respectively, and the average performance of the control and experimental groups in the dimensional measurement was (72.12) and (129.65) respectively, and the common multiple covariance analysis (MANCOVA) was used to test the differences in the arithmetic mean of performance in the sub-dimensions of the creative thinking test. It was found that there were statistically significant differences in the arithmetic mean in the level of significance (α = 0.05), and the difference was in favor of the experimental group in critical and creative thinking skills, which confirms that the program has a significant impact on the development of creative and critical thinking skills.