The influence of social factors on pupil’s creativity in design and technology education

Abstract

The substance of creativity is increasingly recognised in the school curriculum. Paradoxically, schools highlight a mismatch between the significance of the creative process and what has been practiced in classrooms. Many pupils also have difficulty identifying ideas and constructing prepositional frameworks for technology and design projects. Educators strongly propose that design and technology learning areas should provide pupils with tools to exercise their thinking skills. In this study, a concept maps tool was introduced as a learning environment for enhancing pupil's technology learning and creative thinking skills. A concept can be defined as perceived regularities in events or objects, or records of events or objects, designated by labels. Then concept maps in this study become a useful tool for pupils to organise and to represent concepts and knowledge. According to the literature, concept maps are effective in identifying both valid and invalid ideas held by pupils. One of the powerful uses of concept maps is not only as a learning tool but also as an evaluation tool. A quasi-experimental method with pretest-posttest nonequivalent-control-group design was used to analyse pupils' performance. This paper presents and discusses the influence of social factors in cooperative learning on pupils' creativity and creative learning in design and technology education.