Can We Improve Thinking and Creativity in School Children?
Teaching the CoRT lessons at a High school
in Ragusa
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Abstract. In this paper an educational experiment done in Italy is presented. To a test group composed of 14 year old students (in the first year of "L'Istituto tecnico commerciale statale 'F.Besta'", a High school in Ragusa) the CoRT lessons (devised by Dr. de Bono to enhance thinking and creativity in pupils) were imparted for one hour or one hour and a half per week during the entire duration of the school year. A control group was also established, composed of students of the same age and level. Pre and post- tests were administered to both classes to measure creative and ideational capacities at the beginning and at the end of the year.
The test group showed a significant increase in the skills assessed by the assigned tests, while the performance of the control group did not improve, even worsened in some respects.
The data about the Italian cultural scene add to the many studies on the CoRT lessons' effects, showing what was once considered impossible: improving thinking and creativity in students is obtainable.
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The CoRT lessons
The CoRT lessons (the 'CoRT' acronym stands for Cognitive Research Trust - the educational research organisation within which they were elaborated in Cambridge, U.K.). were created by Dr. Edward de Bono in the early 1970s as a teaching method to develop thinking and creativity in pupils. They can be used with students of several ages and skills. They should be taught weekly for one hour or one hour and a half by a qualified teacher.
The lessons offer students, as de Bono says, some tools to broaden perception, since most thinking is done at the input stage: normally the acquisition of information is restricted or narrowed down to certain areas, so that thinking is implicitly conditioned by these.
The corpus is composed of sixty lessons divided into six groups, each including ten lessons. It is possible, however, to carry it out in a basic format of 20-25 hours, that is within the school year.
1) Breadth;
2) Organization, whose aim is to help pupils organize thinking;
3) Interaction, which deals with interactive and critical thinking;
4) Creativity, regarding some suggestions and techniques to promote creativity;
5) Information and Feeling, about how to obtain and evaluate information, and
6) Action, which devises ways of turning thinking into action.
The basic format mentioned earlier is composed of the first and the fourth series, whose main aim is to develop thinking as a general skill. The lessons to be taught are twenty in all and require twenty teaching hours, perhaps twenty-five as some teachers may wish to revise certain parts.
Rather than being theoretical dissertations, the lessons consist of a brief introduction (when a "mind tool" is usually introduced) plus some exercises that the students should do individually or in groups. At the end responses are read and briefly commented upon.
Although they have been successfully applied abroad, in several corners of the world (they have been a compulsory part of the school curricula in Venezuela and Singapore), especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, the CoRT lessons are not well known in Italy.
Experiment structure
This paper will show the effects of the CoRT lessons taught by the author to a class of 14 year students in a High school in Ragusa (l'Istituto tecnico commerciale "F. Besta"), for one year, in the above mentioned basic format.
The need for this research was felt as, notwithstanding the wide literature on the topic in English ( and mainly regarding the Anglo-Saxon world), there was a lack of data about the CoRT effects on the Italian cultural scene.
The research was started at the beginning of the 2000/2001 school year. The experiment was meant to be the first step towards the accumulation of data about the Italian situation.
The group subjected to the experiment was the I E class ( its teaching staff was informed and the experiment was carried out under its supervision).
A control group was also established, the I C, an equivalent class for the average age (14, as it was said, at the beginning of the school year) and for composition according to social and cultural parameters.
The I C permanent classroom was located in a different area of the school in order to avoid any kind of reciprocal influence (in terms of "reflection" that is a spontaneous transmission of models and attitudes) considered by some scholars as one of the risks with this kind of research. Therefore the two classes had very little chance of sharing ideas and talking about the experiment given their location (even the break was separately spent by the two groups in different wings of the building because of the disposition of facilities).
The test group was composed of 14 pupils: the group was initially bigger but some students withdrew during the year. So 14 was the number of people tested at the beginning of the school year (25th September) and re-tested at the end of the experiment (31st May).
15 were, instead, the pupils of the control group that sat the post-test (in order to have two groups numerically equivalent the results of a pupil randomly picked out were excluded. However, it was possible to check that his results fell within the average score and would not have modified the overall results either way).
The post-test took place on the same day for both classes (31st May), whereas for logistic reasons the pre-test for the control group had taken place the day after the test group's (26th September).
Obviously the IC class did not know it was acting as a control group to the IE, that was going to undertake an experimental path. To IC' students it was only told that they should give their best in those two tests meant to measure their ideational and creative abilities.
The Williams's creativity test (CT)
The first of the two tests was the creativity and divergent thinking test elaborated in the American environment by F. Williams, widely used in American schools and then translated into Italian. It consists of two protocols (A and B, for pre-testing and post-testing) suitable for pupils from 6 to 18 years old.
The two protocols present 12 boxes each. Inside each box there is a sketch (which differs from A to B) that students are asked to complete in a new way of which no one else could possibly think , and then to give an "intelligent" title to it. It is clearly a projective technique. The results are then interpreted on the basis of precise indications given by the handbook. Points will be given to each of the factors mentioned above. The total score will be formed by the sum of the points achieved in each factor plus the points given to the titles.
The score for fluidity will be formed by the number of boxes that the student completes in the given time, the score for flexibility by the passage from one of the possible categories of drawings to the other (living beings, symbols, mechanical devices, views and useful things), the score for originality by the capacity of not being caged by the shape given in the box, the score for elaboration by the capacity of embellishing the drawing not just in a symmetrical manner (that is, in the most obvious one). The titles are judged upon their creativity following specific criteria.
The ideational test
The second test was structurally simpler. It consisted of two stimulus - titles (quite similar because provocative but not identical) one for the pre-testing and the other for the post-testing. The students were invited to react to them by producing as many ideas as possible in the given time (20 minutes): the ideas were then counted. In other words it was an ideational test, aimed at measuring students’ reflexive capacities. In this context the linguistic quality (the wording of sentences) was of no matter.
The stimulus - title for pre-test (the same for the two classes) was: "During an animated class discussion between a teacher and a group of students one of the most tense of them swears. What do you think of this situation?"
The stimulus-title for post-test was: "What do you think of students deciding what to do day by day, rather than receiving everything as an imposition through a fixed timetable?"
Some specification is needed on how the ideas were counted.
Usually, thinking is conceived of as equal to judging (as a matter of fact the term "to reflect" means also to mirror, to construct a simple image of the thing as it is): thinking therefore equals assessing the correspondence.
In the meaning employed in this research thinking is not considered the same as evaluating. A judgement is normally a picture of the existing, the immediate. The meaning given here to thinking is another one: thinking is regarded as equal to movement, shift; it is the finishing line not the starting one.
Following this interpretation all ideas such as immediate judgements, prompt reactions ("Red hat ideas", as E. de Bono would say) were not taken into account. For example "It’s so exciting", "It would be marvellous", "I would really like it", "I find it disgusting", "We’ll have a great time", "It is morally wrong". These statements do not establish disparity between the starting and the finishing lines, they do not follow a line of reasoning (from A to B to C), they do not explore, but they report what it is (A is A), in a natural way, almost in an innate manner, inside the thinker. A fixation is not thinking just as thinking is not "natural".
Natural is only to pause on what is.
Similarly, all ideas that were reformulations of previous statements or logical explications of what was implicitly contained in them were not considered as new ideas. A different case is that of reformulations which add reasons, causes or consequences to what has already been said. These were considered new ideas.
Below are presented the scores obtained by I E (test group) to which the CoRT lessons were taught in their basic format, for one hour or one hour and a half per week during the school year (from late September till late May).
Test group
- total score in Williams’s CT test +number of ideas in the ideational test in the pre-test and in the post-test (students’ names are conventional):
Table A
p r e - t e s t p o s t - t e s t
CT II test CT II test
score (number of ideas) score (number of ideas)
Francesca 35 4 88 11
Giovanna 58 3 65 5
Salvo 77 5 98 6
Maria 52 9 78 7
Sonia 69 6 87 9
Roberto 83 3 74 2
Anna 30 6 44 8
Giuseppina 48 3 68 9
Lucia 70 5 74 10
Ivana 65 5 80 6
Rita 91 5 81 7
Sabrina 18 1 54 4
Sara 34 5 61 6
Marco 20 5 51 10
These below are the results obtained by I C that did not receive any particular treatment.
Control group
- total score in Williams’s CT test +number of ideas in the ideational test in the pre-test and in the post-test (students’ names are conventional):Table B
p r e - t e s t p o s t - t e s t
CT II test CT II test
score (number of ideas) score (number of ideas)
Alessandra 53 4 42 4
Silvio 41 6 72 4
Luca 56 5 44 2
Rosario 35 6 78 6
Cettina 76 6 71 3
Carmela 76 4 80 3
Gino 78 4 64 4
Agnese 58 3 50 3
Vittoria 74 4 83 2
Barbara 69 3 42 1
Elisabetta 63 5 44 4
Cristina 54 4 61 3
Martina 84 8 71 3
Vito 52 4 58 3
Some considerations
It is important to specify that the CT test requires some graphic performances. The CoRT lessons do not assign any graphic exercises nor did the test group (or for this matter, the control group) have any opportunity to exercise directly on the specific skills required by Williams’s test during the year. Therefore, improvements (which have been considerable in the test group) are not to be ascribed to direct practice of graphical- pictorial performances.
Now let us have some considerations upon the data.
In the test group (see table A) all the students in the post-test (CT) reported higher scores than in the pre-test, except Rita (she had obtained the highest score of the two classes- a peak difficult to reach again) and Roberto who was not feeling well during the post-test.
The total score for the class was 750 in the pre-test and 1003 in the post-test (+253, the more substantial increases are recorded under originality and titles). The increase, in terms of percentage, of creative ability was 33.7%. The average individual score improved from 53.57 in the pre-test to 71.64 in the post-test (average increase of 18.07 points).
The effect size according to the Glass formula is 0.71.
These are considerable values. The test group after the treatment has also become more homogenous: at the pre-test the standard deviation was 22.65 points, whereas at the post-test it was reduced to 14.83.
Regarding the ideational test during the post-test there was no invitation to the students of the test group to use the techniques and tools of the CoRT lessons. As a matter of fact, the lessons that could have aided the students to develop the composition in a direct manner had been taught more than a month earlier and deliberately ignored in the proximity of the final test.
In other words, the aim was not to measure the direct effect of the CoRT tools, but their diffuse, long-term effect (indeed, no one in their composition mentioned or referred to the CoRT lessons: there is enough reason to believe that if the students had been explicitly invited to use the tools learned earlier the results would have been even better).
In the ideational test, at the post-test, I E (the test group) improved its performance by 53.8%. The additional ideas produced in May are 35: from 65 ideas produced on the whole by the class at the beginning to 100 ideas in the final test.
By looking at table A it is possible to see that all students produced more ideas, except Roberto (who was not feeling well) and Maria (who had done the best performance of the two groups- peaks that are usually very difficult to achieve a second time, as it was said before).
The results in the control group are quite different. At CT (see table B) the performance of the class is stationary (the situation even slightly worsens: the score in September is 869,- higher than the test group’s, which means that IC was theoretically better equipped for future improvements-, but the result in May is 860, –9 then).
The I C' results in the ideational test are more worrying and seemingly more inexplicable: no one in the control group improves their performance at the post-test, only four students match the pre-test results, everyone else becomes worse. Why is it so?
If the CT result was to some extent taken for granted because no exercise of any type to extend creativity had been conducted in the class, at least a little improvement was expected in the ideational test, both because of students’ growth and as result of one year of study in several subjects that one presupposes develop ideas.
Why, then, had there not been any increase in the number of ideas (on the contrary, from 66 initial ideas- which was a higher number than the test group’s- there is a decrease to 45 final ideas, a loss of about 34.4%)? There are two possible explanations: one more "catastrophic", that is, a school year would not improve the capacity to produce ideas, on the contrary it would even dull the minds of pupils (there are no strong elements to hold this theory); and a second, more convincing one, linked to the period when the post-test was assigned: the time of final oral exams, that normally create stress and confusion among students, who lack, then, the necessary freshness to give the best in the test of the two which requires a higher mental effort.
But if this explanation was true, given that the test group was in the same conditions as the control group (the post-test took place for both groups on the same day and IE was under the same stress) as a consequence, in normal conditions, a even richer production of ideas should be expected in the test group.
Conclusion
Certainly the number of students in the test group is not high enough to affirm conclusively that the CoRT lessons have a positive effect on the creativity and reflexivity of students, as measured by the two tests described above. But if the encouraging results of the present research are considered under the light of the rich research literature in English on the positive effects of the CoRT lessons, it is possible to conclude in a convincing manner that the yet scarce data on the Italian cultural context, together with the many data from other parts of the world, confirm what once seemed impossible: improving the reflexivity and creativity of students is possible.
Even the anecdotic impressions of the writer are very positive and the reaction of students to the CoRT lessons during the year was almost always enthusiastic.
It is hoped, however, that new data will be added to the those presented in this article at the end of the next school year, not only because of the author's efforts, but because of the wish of more and more teachers to walk a new educational path.
Giuseppe Tidona
Istituto tecnico commerciale "F. Besta" - Ragusa