Investigation of creative problem-solving skills in 60-84 months old children who attend an educational institute

Early childhood is the period when the child steps into the future and begins to establish the foundations of his or her future. During this period, the multiplicity and features of the stimuli around the child affect the child's development and make it easier to learn. Problem-solving skills, which begin to develop during this period, play an active role in the acquisition of daily life skills in and out of the school environment, thus enabling the child to become a questioning, investigating and critical thinking individual. The child, with the solutions he or she provides to the problems that comes up, will be an individual who produces and keeps up with the requirements of the changing age. This research has been conducted with the purpose of studying the problem-solving skills of children aged 60-84 months. In addition, the relation between children's demographic variables was examined with the findings obtained within the scope of the research and the following results were obtained. The study group of the research that was made using the relational screening model, which is among the general screening models, consists of 76 children aged 60-84 months. Children were selected through the random method and easy accessibility principle from private and public schools, located in the provincial borders of Istanbul and selected on the European and Anatolian sides, that are affiliated to the Ministry of National Education in 2016-2017 educational year. Three different measurement tools were used in the study to determine the relation between creative thinking levels and creative problem solving of students aged 60-84 months. These are respectively: "Personal Information Form" prepared by the researcher to determine the demographic characteristics of the students, "Torrance Creative Thinking Test Figural A Form" to determine creative thinking levels and the "Creative Problem Solving Form" developed by the researcher in rubric form in order to determine the levels of creative problem solving. Of the children in the study group, 49 children are 60-71 months (61.6%) while 27 children are 72-84 (38.4%) months. Of the children, 30 (39.5%) are girls while 46 (60.5%) are male. Demographic, descriptive frequencies, and percentage distributions of children, who make up the study group, have been determined, and then ss, SHx, values for the total scores of the scale have been presented as tables. It has been found that Torrance Creative Thinking Test figural scores, the creativity skill levels are higher in children who have continued school for 25 months and more. On the other hand, there has been found no significant difference between the children that have continued school for 7-12 months and the children that have continued school for 13-24 months and between the children that have continued school for 13-24 months and the children that have continued school for 25 months and more (p>.05). The Scheffe Test, which was conducted to determine among which groups total figural score of Torrance creative thinking tests differ according to the school type variable that the child attend to, has shown that the difference was in the p <.05 level in favor of children who study in public schools, kindergarten and nursery. It has been understood that the Torrance Creative Thinking Test figural scores of the ones who go to public school are more positive compared to the ones who go to private school; kindergarten and nursery are more positive compared to private schools. On the other hand, no significant difference was found between the public school, kindergarten and nursery (p>.05). Pearson's analysis test has been applied to determine whether there was a meaningful relationship between the Torrance Creative Thinking Test Figural Scale scores and the Creative Problem-Solving scores of the children that make up the study group. As a result of the test no significant relation has been detected between the Torrance Creative Thinking Test Figural Scale and creative problem solving (r = -0.99; p>.05). Likewise, it has been found that the creative problem-solving skill levels of the children participating in the study are as follows: 36 (47.4%) are "low", 39 (51.3%) are "middle" and 1 is "high" (1.3%). In line with the analyzes made, it has been concluded that creative Problem-Solving Rubric assesses children's creative problem solving skills and the creative problem-solving skills of children participating in the study are at a "moderate" level.