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 221

Table 7 Posttest-pretest
mean rank comparisons of the
comparison group on the
three dimensions of the TTCT
using the Wilcoxon signed-
ranks test ( N

Dimensions Z Sig. Effect size

Fluency 1.47 0.14 0.19

Flexibility 0.20 0.84 0.04

Originality 2.08 0.04* 0.46

26)

¼

Overall TTCT 0.45 0.66 0.23

* p 0.05

Note : Effect size in terms of the PS (probabilistic superiority)
value is calculated for the two related samples design (Grissom &
Kim, 2012 )

<

The treatment group comparisons were statistically significantly different

( p creative thinking abilities, while

the approximate effect size (as categorized by Cohen, 1988 ) of the difference
between the posttest and the pretest was very large for all three dimensions as
well as for the whole instrument. However, there was a statistically significant
difference ( p

0.01) for all three dimensions of students

< '

0.05) only for the originality dimension of the comparison group
(see Table 7 ). The approximate effect size (as categorized by Cohen, 1988 ) of the
posttest-pretest difference for all the three dimensions and the overall instrument
was relatively small or very small.
Creativity was measured by students forming new ideas or hypotheses, testing
and developing these hypotheses, and transmitting the data (Dass, 2004 ). A distinct
relationship between creativity and scientific attitudes has not been clearly reported
previously; however, there are some PBL studies which reported the effectiveness
in both creativity and scientific attitudes (Cho, Kim, & Lee, 2011 ; Yoon & Woo,
2009 ). The nature of creativity in science has some characteristics similar to
creativity involved in scientific attitudes. In that sense, the effectiveness in creativ-
ity after PBL is consistent with the effectiveness in scientific attitudes.

<

6 Conclusions and Implications for Teaching and Research

This study has shown that although the mean rank values for all seven dimensions
of the Scientific Attitudes Questionnaire were not statistically different for the
treatment group compared to the comparison group. However, comparison of the
pretest and posttest mean rank scores for the treatment group showed that there was
a statistically significant improvement for the openness, criticism, cooperativeness,
and creativity dimensions as well as for the overall scientific attitudes instrument.
As for the comparison group, the pretest-posttest comparison was statistically
significant for only the openness dimension. Examining in more detail, the creativ-
ity dimension showed that the PBL laboratory course had a significant influence on
students

creative thinking abilities with statistically significantly differences in the
mean rank scores of the fluency, flexibility, and originality dimensions of the TTCT
as well as on the overall mean of the TTCT . As for the comparison group, the

'