Abstract:

In related literature, mostly research findings indicated that the effect of art education upon creative thinking is positive. Also, prominent researchers pointed out that critical thinking can be gained by art education. That is, it can be expected that the effect of art education on critical thinking is also helpful. In contrast to that, some research findings upon the creative thinking reported that the effect of art education on creative thinking is ambiguous. However, it was not found any research finding in the literature reported that art education has also positive effect upon critical thinking. Hence, this study aimed to investigate the effect of visual arts education upon creative thinking and critical thinking disposition of Turkish university students. Thus, this study is first to compare the Visual Arts Education students with non-art students regarding critical thinking dispositions. As a regarding to this interaction, it was made a prediction such that Visual Arts Education would have a significant positive impact on art students compared to non-art students in terms of the creative thinking and critical thinking disposition skills. The causal comparative research design was implemented in this study with using of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking and California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory. For that, it was compared Visual Arts Education students (N= 33) with Elementary Teacher Education students (N= 32) to investigate whether the creative thinking and critical thinking disposition of Visual Arts Education students were significantly differ from Elementary Teacher Education ones as non-art students. According to results, it was not found significant effect indicating that Visual Arts Education students performed better than Elementary Teacher Education students upon creative thinking and critical thinking disposition. However, art students had high scores on creative thinking subscale of Fluency as significant. In contrast, Elementary Teacher Education students had significant scores on Titles as the other creative thinking subscale. This situation is also meaningful in terms of differences between education disciplines as much as Visual Arts Education students and Elementary Teacher Education students. According to this result, it is suggested that future study should be conducted the thinking styles of students in terms of the teaching

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