Effects of Curriculum Intervention on Divergent Thinking Abilities

Abstract

The primary objective of this study is to evaluate the divergent thinking abilities of first-year architecture students who are currently enrolled in a course focused on thinking in architecture. The statistical analysis of student’s studio works with Wallach Kogan`s divergent thinking pre/posttests results demonstrated that the post-test score for verbal stimuli fluency was higher than the visual posttest score. In addition, the post-test score for visual flexibility was higher than the verbal posttest score. In originality students got the highest scores in posttests both in visual and verbal tasks.  Besides the correlation analysis indicated a strong correlation between fluency and originality. These results revealed that design training considerably enhances students' capacity to produce original ideas both in visual and verbal thinking. In terms of their ability to create considerably more and qualified ideas on related themes students demonstrate more improvement in their verbal reasoning abilities than their visual reasoning skills. The present study determined that curricular intervention in the first semester training where the instructor emphasized development of divergent thinking skills improved students' both visual and verbal divergent thinking skills, to a greater degree in originality and to a lesser degree in fluency and flexibility in idea generation.