This study developed a social creativity enhancement program to promote the balanced development of creativity and social communication using creativity techniques and applied the program to the early childhood education field to examine the effect.
For the development of this program, literature and previous research on creativity, social communication, creativity techniques, and the NURI Curriculum were reviewed. In selecting creativity techniques employed in the program, this study used on-the-spot opinions of one creativity expert and five preschool teachers. In addition, three experts and five preschool teachers in the child education field were consulted at each stage of the program development to review, revise and supplement the program''s validity and suitability. A revised program used to conduct preliminary research on 14 children aged five years and developed the final program reflecting the evaluation of the program.
The program developed through these procedures aimed to grow children into talented people with social creativity that demonstrates both creativity and effective communication skills in a social context. The specific goals are to facilitate creativity (divergent thinking, convergent thinking, knowledge, character, and motivation) and social communication skills (listening, controlling emotion, expressing feelings, understanding others'' intentions, sharing feelings, showing interest in others, cooperation for solutions, and abiding by social rules) through the program. For this purpose, creativity techniques (brainstorming, forced connection, SCAMPER, unusual uses, free association, analogizing, and six thinking hats) were utilized. Through this process, this study built the social creative balance model, which seeks a balance between creativity and social communication. The current study developed and applied the program, which consisted of six courses in three stages of the teaching-learning process.
To verify the effectiveness of the developed program, this study conducted an experiment on 70 children (35 in the experimental group and 35 in the comparison group) from two national daycare centers in City H. The research instruments were creativity and social communication ability using Jeon’s (2000) juvenile comprehensive creativity test, Yun’s (2012) early childhood social skills test, and Bae et al.’s (2000) language problem-solving ability test. The experimental procedure was carried out by the researcher 16 times in total, from July 1 to August 31, 2017. The experimental group implemented the social creativity promotion program using the creativity technique, and the comparison group did free choice activities according to their progress. For data analysis, an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was performed to see if there were significant differences between the groups using the SPSS 18.0 statistical program.
The study has shown that the creativity of the experimental group was higher than that of the comparison group in the subcomponents of creativity (fluency, flexibility, originality, and imagination) and that the difference was statistically significant. Furthermore, given that differences between the two groups in terms of social skills (problem-solving, emotional expression, public order consciousness, and confidence) and language problem-solving ability (cause-reason, reasoning inference, and clue guessing) were statistically significant, children''s social communication skills appeared to improve as a result of the program . This implies that the social creativity enhancement program using the creativity technique had a positive effect on the creativity and social communication of young children.
The following are the implications of this study. First, the program promotes social creativity by providing young children with opportunities to show individual creativity effectively in a social context and supports young children in fully demonstrating their social communication skills, which is an early childhood development task. Second, this study applied effective and concrete methods that can be combined with social communication in the process of using creativity techniques for the organic combination of creativity and social communication. Through the results, this study suggested a method to promote the inner motivation and interest of young children. At the same time, this study increases the possibility of applying the social creativity enhancement program to the field of early childhood education by presenting the specificity of teaching. Further, it is meaningful to solidifying a connection between the social creativity enhancement program and the NURI Curriculum.