Interdisciplinary PBL Curriculum and Its Influence on the Creative Thinking Ability of Elementary School Students

Abstract

Promoting student’s creative thinking abilities has become increasingly important nowadays and many countries already started to put it in the first place of teaching. This study wanted to find out the impact on students' creative thinking abilities after having an interdisciplinary course and project-based learning (PBL) implemented course. The study used a test based on the PISA 2022 framework for creative thinking as the main assessment tool to analyze students' creative thinking abilities. The participants include a total of 48 grade 6 elementary students in Tainan. They were assigned as two classes, which one class is the one that will join the interdisciplinary PBL course, and the other one will not, they are the experimental group (N=26) and the control group (N=22) respectively. The study used a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design, and the experimental teaching lasted for 18 weeks. A mixed-method is used that both quantitative and qualitative data are systematically collected and analyzed. For the quantitative study, the students’ creative thinking abilities were measured by the test. For the qualitative research, 8 students from the experimental group were randomly chose to have an interview with open-ended questions. Three statistical methods are used to analyze the result which included paired sample t-test, independent sample t-test, and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). The result shows that interdisciplinary PBL courses are a practical and effective method for enhancing most of the students' creative thinking abilities. They provide educational insights and practical recommendations for future research and practice.

Date of Award	2024
Original language	English
Supervisor	Hsu-Chan Kuo (Supervisor)