This article presents the results of a study comparing the originality, the length, the number of neologisms and the syntactic complexity of fairy tales created with "Storyline" and "Associations Pyramid." Both methods were developed to enhance children's language abilities and their creative thinking. One hundred twenty eight 5-year-old children…

This paper is linked to a previous paper outlining an evaluation of a thinking skills intervention (Burke & Williams, 2008). Following extensive requests for the assessment tools used in the intervention, this short paper presents the development and potential uses of two thinking skills assessment tools. The aim of the paper is simply to make…

Over the past decade there has been a major move to position "thinking" (however thinking is defined and enacted) as a more explicit outcome within the curriculum of many nations, with implications for teachers' professional development, assessment, and examination requirements. This paper analyses approaches to this challenge taken by Israel, New…

The study reported was part of a large thinking skills intervention for 11-12-year-old children. This paper focuses on the impact of a thinking skills intervention on children's understandings of intelligence. A total of 178 children (n = 86 girls and n= 92 boys) across six schools participated in the study. Children were individually pre-tested…

The purpose of the current study is to investigate the impact of future thinking, and the fit between future thinking and future orientation on creative thinking. In Study 1, 83 undergraduates were randomly assigned to three groups: 50-year future thinking, 5-year future thinking, and the present-day thinking. First, the priming tasks, in which…

The objective of the instructional experiment was to examine if the use of thinking styles is flexible in traditional and hypermedia learning environments, and if a hypermedia learning environment possesses obvious advantages than a traditional environment in adapting to students with different thinking styles. The participant university students…

The central issue of this paper is to review the possible relationships between the constructs of critical thinking and executive functions. To do this, we first analyse the essential components of critical thinking from a psychological and neurological point of view. Second, we examine the scope of the cognitive and neurological nature of…

Two studies are reported that used multiple measures of creativity to investigate creativity differences and correlates in arts and science students. The first study examined Divergent Thinking fluency, Self-Rated Creativity and Creative Achievement in matched groups of Art and Science students. Arts students scored higher than Science students on…

Although the development and transfer of critical thinking skills are recognized as primary goals for education, there is little empirical evidence to help educators decide how to teach in ways that enhance critical thinking. In two studies, we compared explicit and imbedded instructional modes and assessed critical thinking with the Halpern…

Research, carried out mainly in the period between the 1960s and 1980s, reported significant differences in the thinking styles of science and arts students. At this time university and school teaching was highly specialised and concern was expressed in the ongoing "two cultures" debate (Snow, 1959).Considerable changes have taken place in the…

This commentary looks at the contributions and future research implications of the four articles in this Special Issue of "Thinking Skills and Creativity" to the fields of creativity and creativity education, both in culture-specific and culture-general terms. The articles included in this Special Issue draw attention to issues of development,…

With a sample of Grade 4 Chinese students, the present study examined whether the electronic version was comparable to the paper-and-pencil version of the Wallach-Kogan Creativity Tests (WKCT). It was found that the two versions generated similar patterns of reliability coefficients and inter-correlation coefficients for the eight creativity…

The current study compared the effects on comprehension and memory of learning via text versus learning via argument map. Argument mapping is a method of diagrammatic representation of arguments designed to simplify the reading of an argument structure and allow for easy assimilation of core propositions and relations. In the current study, 400…

This paper describes an investigation into the nature of musical intelligence and its links with creativity across two continents, Europe and Africa. In seeking to identify the intellectual processes associated with musical intelligence, improvised music was examined as an example of problem solving in this domain. Twenty-four musicians (twelve…

The social desirability of characteristics associated with creativity and cultural stereotypes was examined across Polish and Chinese cultures. Polish responses were compared with those from an earlier Chinese study (n = 451). First, we carried out an initial study among 116 Polish students to determine what traits are parts of the national…