Second-Year College Students’ Scientific Attitudes and Creative Thinking Ability: Influence of a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) Chemistry Laboratory Course - Affective Dimensions in Chemistry Education - page 217

three mental characteristics of fluency, flexibility, and originality in the TTCT are
not relevant to a chemistry learning environment. However, the nature of PBL
enhances the relevance of these mental characteristics because students are required
to consider all possible appropriate solutions to a problem before deciding on the
most efficient one.
The first author explained what the students were required to do in each of the six
tasks according to the instructional manual. Students were then given 40 min to
complete the six tasks, first as a pretest before commencing the laboratory course
and again 12 weeks later as a posttest on completion of the course. The internal
consistency (Cronbach ' s alpha reliability) of TTCT for this study was found to be
0.94.
The scoring of students

creative thinking ability in the six tasks was done by the
first and second authors according to the guidelines provided by Kim ( 2004 ). The
two authors first discussed the scoring instructions until consensus was reached on
how best to perform the scoring. Both authors adhered closely to the consensus that
they had reached in order to minimize the influence of subjectivity in the scoring,
especially with respect to the measure of originality. Answers that are not com-
monly provided by students were considered to have originality. In particular
instances, for example, with respect to “relevant ideas” in fluency, it was left to
the discretion of the scorer to decide on the relevance of an answer. The scoring
guidelines for each of the three mental characteristics are summarized in Table 1 .

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Table 1 Guidelines for scoring mental characteristics in the TTCT [from Kim ( 2004 )]
Fluency Flexibility Originality

1. Decide whether each
answer is appropriate or not

1. Categorize the answers that
were scored for fluency using
the list of categories provided
in the manual

1. Examine each answer in
the different categories to
ascertain whether it is origi-
nal or not

2. Count the number of
appropriate answers

2. Count the number of differ-
ent categories

2. Score 0 for not original
(creative) answer. The list of
answers corresponding to
score 0 is provided in the
manual

3. Answers that you can find
out immediately by looking
at the picture are considered
as inappropriate ones

3. Answers in the same cate-
gory are counted only once

3. Answers not in the list are
scored as having originality

4. Refer to some examples of
inappropriate answers pro-
vided in the manual

4. Count the number of orig-
inal (creative) answers