The effect of Turkish lessons structured with creative drama method on the creative thinking and problem solving skills of gifted students

This study, which uses a mixed research design, aims to determine how effective Turkish lessons restructured with the creative drama activities are on the higher-order thinking skills of gifted students. Data collection and analysis of this study has been conducted with convergent parallel model for mixed analysis method using qualitative and quantitative tools. While collecting data, Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, The Creative Problem Solving Attributes Inventory, researcher diaries, student diaries, and focus group interviews were used. While the semi-experimental research method with control group was used in the quantitative dimension of the research, the basic qualitative research design was used in the qualitative dimension. The study group of this research consists of the students of Samsun Science and Art Center located in the province of Samsun. These students are in the BYF-1 (Recognition of Individual Talents Program) group. The experimental group and control group of the research consist of 16 students. During the implementation phase, Turkish lessons based on creative drama activities were taught to the students in the experimental group, while the control group students continued their own lessons during this process. The content analysis method was used to analyze qualitative data collected. In the quantitative analysis of the collected data, Mann-Whitney U and Wilcoxon Signed Rank tests, which are non-parametric tests, were used. According to the findings of the research, it was determined that Turkish lessons structured with creative drama activities improved the verbal creativity and creative problem solving skills of gifted students. At the end of the research, it was seen that the students in the experimental group improved significantly in the fluency, originality, abstractness of titles, and enrichment sub-dimensions of formal creativity. However, it was observed that the scores obtained from the sub-dimensions of resistance to early closure and creative forces list did not improve significantly. The results of the retention test administered after five weeks show that verbal creative thinking, formal creative thinking, and creative problem solving skills scores did not decrease significantly. There was no significant difference between the pre-test and post-test of the control group students in formal creativity, verbal creativity and creative problem solving skills.