The Effects of Thinking Style Based Cooperative Learning on Group Creativity

Abstract

Recent studies have emphasized group creativity within a socio-cultural context rather than at an individual level, but not many researchers reported strategies for developing group creativity. This paper aims to explore strategies to enhance group creativity based on the theoretical basis of thinking styles by Sternberg. The hypothesis was that groups with members of diverse thinking styles would show greater gains in creative performance. In this study, the participants (n=72) were divided into 24 three-person groups. Each group was given the task to create a game using Scratch programming language. Among the 24 groups, eleven groups (n=33) consisted of heterogeneous thinking styles, and the other thirteen groups (n=39) consisted solely of homogeneous thinking styles. All divided groups performed same creative task. The empirical results supported the hypothesis that group formation of diverse thinking style shows better group creativity.