ARTICLE ON CREATIVE AND CRITICAL THINKING

ARTICLE ON CREATIVE AND CRITICAL THINKING

What is the difference between critical and creative thinking?

         Being a thinker who can apply both critical and creative thinking is necessary for increasing the level of competence in performing certain tasks and dealing with daily life. Both types of these thinking need to be nurtured because both of the thinking abilities can guarantee the beneficial and development of one’s personal life, educational level, wider views and economic development. Creative and critical thinking skills are considered essential for students (Crane, 1983). He claimed that both critical and creative thinking play equal and important roles in completing a better andragogy across the mission of long life learning. Even though both of the thinking are often contrasted, but the combination of these two thinking definitely will create a better thinker. How critical thinking differ from creative thinking? What are the strategies can be applied in both critical and creative thinking?

Specifically, critical thinking is convergent while creative thinking is divergent. Critical thinking will activate the usage of left brain as compared to critical thinking and critical thinking to seek for relevant facts, information and argument about technical subject. Meanwhile, creative thinking, the right side of the brain will be activated more than left brain, is to create something new by inserting the senses of innovative and inventive. In the other words, critical thinking involves synthesis and evaluation of information while creative thinking includes the importance of initiative and imagination. These thinking are contrasted but intimately linked. Both teaching and learning process should include critical and creative thinking in order to enhance learning in students’ case study, self-learning and problem solving in daily life.

Critical Thinking

            The differences of critical and creative thinking can be differentiated by their components. The components for critical thinking include making inferences with inductive or deductive reasoning skills, judging and making evaluation after observation, creating sensible argument and solving obstacles or problems besides making decisions. In the other words, it is about a reasonable reflective thinking that focuses on what to believe or what to do. Researchers found out that people can develop their critical thinking competencies when they were in their early age. Critical thinking skill is correlated to create metacognition and motivation for students in achieving their learning outcomes.

Metacognition, thinking about thinking, in critical thinking supports students by implanting self-worth and self-determination in students themselves. For the example, it encourages students to evaluate and monitor their own thinking process and as a result, they are likely to perform high quality of ideas. Furthermore, when metacognition included in forming critical thinking, self regulated learning among the students will increase effectively. This is because the ability for making critical reasoning and sensible arguments in themselves will regulated often.

Most of the researchers view that motivation can facilitated the development of critical thinking. Facione (2002) defined disposition as the consistent internal motivation to engage problems and solve problems. Motivation is the presupposition for critical thinking and high order thinking skills in having encourages to create and deal with large flow of ideas. With motivation, people can encourage themselves to create ideas and think beyond the theories based on the facts and facilitate critical thinking by asking how, what and why for problem solving. Motivation supports critical thinking in students and those who are motivated to learn are more likely to persist the tasks given and call for critical thinking.

            The main characteristics of critical thinking included active and open. They are active and not passive because they ask question and do analyses to uncover some tasks and to assure their understanding. Meanwhile, critical thinking is said to be opened because they free to create and generate new ideas or perspectives. They do not view certain idea in egotistical way but they investigate for the evidence.

Creative Thinking

            Creative thinking involves imagination, initiative and one’s own way of thinking style in finding solutions to learning tasks. Clegg (2008), Feldman and Benjamin (2006) reported that creativity has becoming a topic of ever-increasing interest to educational settings. Indeed, teachers carry a big responsible in facilitating students’ creativity and their potentials in the classroom. In the other words, teachers serve as the metronome and role model in the classroom and help students to develop their thinking potentials. Teachers’ missions not only stop at the development of students’ in the classroom but teachers need to maximize students’ potentials and help them to apply in their daily life.

            Creative thinking can be said as expressive, productive, innovative and imaginative thinking. It can be facilitated by making smart guesses on certain tasks, modified and speak out their own opinions and formulating hypotheses and communicated the results. Creative thinking promotes creation or thinks out of the box when solving problems to improve the existing theories. An obvious example can be shown when the generation of mobile phone keep renovating and becoming more advance in varieties of designs and functions. Besides that, the development of hard disk, which can store 1 Terabyte in a mobile and convenient size, is created to replace floppy disk, which can only store 4 Megabyte when it invented for the first time around late 1960. Next, emergenative is a type of creative thinking skill that introduces a new creation of another way of thinking. As an example, for launching Green Revolution, chemical fertilizers and insecticides are invented in order to solve agriculture’s problems.

            The main characteristics in creative thinking include looking for variety of answers and allowing imagination to flow through. Creative thinkers are encourage to search for variety of alternatives and problem solving methods while try to view the problem in the different perspectives. In addition, creative thinking allows imagination in searching for answers. Some of the ideas may sound silly or unacceptable but creative thinkers know the limit and the barrier of their ability in providing a proper and suitable problem solving method .

Strategies That Can Be Applied In Critical And Creative Thinking

            How can we measure the effectiveness of critical and creative thinking in the classroom as these thinking are abstract? The way of thinking and the way of the students expressing their thought can be evaluated easily whether they are critical or creative thinkers. Moreover, high qualities thinkers can create innovative but sensible ideas as compared to normal thinkers because they can see further and can think out of the box. Students’ attitude towards the effort to apply critical and creative thinking in the classroom is very important and when the students are willing to receive the teacher’s way of teaching, they can adapt much more knowledge than they expected. Critical and creative thinking can act as teaching medium in the classroom by expanding students’ horizon and the way of thinking, exploring variety possibilities for solving the problems, generating and exchanging ideas, making evaluations on the assumptions and enacting the solution. Thus, critical and creative thinking can be applied in the classroom in many effective strategies.

            Approaches or strategies that involved in critical thinking including nurture rational thinking, be open minded in adapting ideas, have disciplinary in gathering information and give out judgments. Rationality in critical thinking is a compulsory element because this sense enables one to analyze apparent confusion and ask questions in sensible way. A rational thinking person will rely on reasons and evidences rather than emotion. Rationality will lead one to be more concern about finding the best explanation and evidence to search for solution. In critical thinking, the element of open mindedness is encouraged for the thinkers to evaluate all the reasonable inferences in order to make conclusion, consider variety of possible views to the subject matter and able to accept new ideas to evidence’s reevaluation. For an example, the varieties theories in education such as Behaviorism, Innatism and Interactionism are being accepted in explaining students’ behaviors during learning process. Students’ behaviors not only restrict to one theory but those critical thinkers enable to accept new opinions and conclude them into their thinking to form their own conclusion.

            What do disciplinary means in critical thinking? Thinkers need to be precise and meticulous when searching for comprehensive and exhaustive ideas. After the thinkers gathered all the information needed, they need to conclude and give explanation based on their own thinking and not just copying others’ ideas. For the element of judgment, when searching for information and others’ views toward certain tasks, critical thinkers enable to recognize the extent and the weight of the evidence. They can know how far the relevance of the perspectives and the assumptions go and they are able to detect the weaknesses of the views.

            There are many techniques can be used in approaching creative thinking. The open mindedness element also occurs in creative thinking but the way is a bit different from critical thinking. Creative thinkers will open to ideas, look for ways to make something works and pushing the idea to its limits by including the sense of imagination. In the classroom, teacher can encourages students to brainstorm on a topic and just write down all the ideas that flow through their mind. Moreover, by asking students the same questions for at least twenty times, students are able to give out different answer and different opinions each times. The compulsory method to create more creative thinkers is to keep asking question to question: Why do you think you know the answer and do you have any evidence to support your opinions? Next, teacher need to encourage students to keep an ideas book and  jot down their ideas straight away when they figure out something new as the ideas can slip away easily. Furthermore, the design of the curriculum or outdoor activities in school also needs to include the elements of play, teamwork, problem solving and imagination to boost the students’ creativity.

Conclusion

            An idea of balance training in creative thinking and critical thinking is the superior thinking. There is no saying stated about which thinking is higher than another thinking but both critical and creative thinking need to be sharpen to create superior idea. The combination of both of the thinking can develop a higher thinking ability. The role of imagination and creativity, with the sense of rationality from critical thinking, in explaining certain concept will create high level of thinking level. In Malaysia, government facilitates high order thinking skills by adapting many questions that require students’ opinion based on their own view and facts in the examination. Thus, in order to create and facilitate critical and creative thinking, thinkers need to take their chances to think outside the box based on rational and explainable facts.