International Journal of Social Sciences & Educational Studies

ISSN 2520-0968 (Online), ISSN 2409-1294 (Print), October 2017, Vol.4, No.2 (Special Issue)

Using Discovery Learning to Encourage Creative Thinking

Mardia Hi. Rahman1

1
Khairun University of Ternate, South Maluku, Indonesia
Correspondence: Mardia Hi. Rahman, Khairun University of Ternate, South Maluku, Indonesia.
Email: [email protected]

Received: August 24, 2017 Accepted: September 28, 2017 Online Published: October 1, 2017

doi: 10.23918/ijsses.v4i2sip98

Abstract: Creative thinking ability development is needed to be implemented by every educator including
lecturers to their students. Therefore, they need to seriously act and design their learning process. One of the
ways to develop student’s creative thinking is using discovery learning model. This research is conducted in
physics education study program in 2016 with students who took learning and teaching class as research
subject. From the research analysis result and discussion, it can be concluded that discovery learning model
can encourage students’ creative thinking ability in learning and teaching strategy subject.

Keywords: Creative Thinking, Discovery Learning

1. Introduction

Creating or shaping new idea from thinking result is a creative way of thinking. Creative thinking is an
ability owned by individual to formulate problem solving (Sternberg, 1988), in other words, an
individual with good creative thinking ability will make such individual also has a good ability on
solving the problems they face (Gee, 2003). Piaget (as cited in Bräuchler, 2009) stated that education
main purpose is to create human beings who are capable in doing new things, not only use the previous
generation’s creation. Meanwhile Ginsberg and Opper (as cited in Hadzigeorgiou, Fokialis, &
Kabouropoulou, 2012) said that the second purpose of education is to build understanding and how the
students are able to verify and not easily accept what have been done.

Developing creative thinking ability for the students requires a creative lecturer. Creative lecturer is a
lecturer who is able to actualize all the abilities to optimally educate, train, and guide the students in
accordance with the expected purposes (Carter & McRae, 2014; Craft, Hall, & Costello, 2014; Sternberg
& Williams, 1996). Creative lecturers will also find new strategies to develop the potentials of the
students. The lecturer must attempt to create comfortable and pleasing learning environment for the
students in a way that made them able to explore all the abilities they have.

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 International Journal of Social Sciences & Educational Studies
ISSN 2520-0968 (Online), ISSN 2409-1294 (Print), October 2017, Vol.4, No.2 (Special Issue)

Lecturer need to develop students’ creative thinking from the early beginning, since student’s creative
thinking make them able to solve the problems they have (Pithers & Soden, 2000). This is in accordance
with English, Lesh, and Fennewald (2008) who argued that thinking ability need to be developed from
the early beginning, since it is expected to equip them in facing daily problems. The thinking ability is
also an instrument to achieve education goal, i.e., the student’s ability to solve high level problem.

The discussion and research on creative thinking have been conducted by many researchers, i.e.,
Gregory, Hardiman, Yarmolinskaya, Rinne, and Limb (2013) in their writing stated that the student’s
creative thinking ability will grow due to the influence of several factors that can be directly stimulated
in the class rooms, e.g., by giving chances to student to ask question. Classrooms often give too few
chances for the students to think creatively, but creative thinking and problem solving can be shaped
with various ways, among others are lecturer can encourage the students to find new connection between
different ideas or to ask the students to offer several and various solutions to complex problem (Brooks
& Brooks, 1999; Sternberg & Williams, 1996). If the lecturer think creative thinking is important for
students’ success, the lecturer must explicitly encourage and teach creativity to the students. Next,
Torrance and Safter (in Hamza & Griffith, 2006) said that in order to make the students learning
creatively the students should be encouraged to explore, question, experiment, manipulate, listen, and
test the problems they face. The students will learn better, be more critical in thinking, and more able to
think creatively if they learn in safe environment (Brookfield, 2017). Safe environment will make
students feel more comfortable to deliver their opinion and ideas, to take risk, to be open to changes, to
be creative and have concern.

Developing students creative thinking ability can be done by the lecturers by developing learning model
that train the students to discover. One of learning and teaching strategy is discovery learning model.
Discovery learning model means that in learning, the students need to be trained to find the concepts or
theories relevant with the taught materials (Bruner, 1961; Janssen, Westbroek, & van Driel, 2014).
Learning with discovery always involves the students to discover from their learned problem and the
experiences they have. Discovering by themselves or solving the problems they face will require the
students to develop creative way of thinking. This is in accordance with one of discovery’s purposes in
learning, i.e., to develop creativity and critical thinking ability (Ausubel, 1964).

Discovery learning is a learning model, where students build their own knowledge by conducting
experiment to find a principle from such experiment (Saab, Joolingen, & Hout-Wolters, 2005; Van
Joolingen, De Jong, Lazonder, Savelsbergh, & Manlove, 2005). Furthermore Shulman and Keisler (in
Mayer, 2004) stated that learning with guided discovery model generally is more effective than pure
discovery (Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006). There are several students who do not learn the rule or
principle with pure discovery, but instead with guided discovery. The guided discovery model is
perceived as more effective model since this model can help the students to fill two important
requirements in active learning, (1) activating or building knowledge to make understanding of the new
information and (2) integrating the acquired new information until they discover the correct knowledge
(Alfieri, Brooks, Aldrich, & Tenenbaum, 2011; Leutner, 1993). Pure discovery model can fail if it is
unable to help the students building the knowledge stated in the two requirements. Bruner said that
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 International Journal of Social Sciences & Educational Studies
ISSN 2520-0968 (Online), ISSN 2409-1294 (Print), October 2017, Vol.4, No.2 (Special Issue)

discovery learning model is a model where the students are allowed to discover new rule and new ideas,
not memorizing what is said or delivered by the teacher (Bruner, 1961; Mayer, 2004).

2. Method

This research used class research method focused on discovery learning model implementation in
studying, learning and teaching strategy to encourage student’s creative thinking. This research aimed to
study the enhancement of creative thinking ability by using discovery learning model. Variable in this
research is students creative thinking ability that can be seen from student’s ability to solve the designed
test adapted to the creative thinking ability indicator.

This research was conducted in Khairun University of Ternate at Physics study program students of
2016/2017 academic year between October and November 2016. The research subject was 44 students.
To measure creative thinking ability, this research used a developed questionnaire (reliability = 0.899;
validity = 0.608—956) of 10 items. Creative thinking ability test used the following equation:

With following criteria:

3. Results and Discussion

Creative thinking ability in this research consisted of fluency, i.e., generating many ideas in various
categories, originality, i.e., having new ideas to solve problem, and elaboration, i.e., the ability to solve
the problem in detail (Kim, 2006). The creative thinking ability result in this research is shown in Table
1 below,
Table 1: Summary for descriptive analysis result
Component Pre-test Post-test
Maximum Score 76 88
Minimum Score 25 50
Range 51 38
Average 52,66 69,39
N 44 44

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ISSN 2520-0968 (Online), ISSN 2409-1294 (Print), October 2017, Vol.4, No.2 (Special Issue)

Table 2 shows that during pre-test there were 12 students in the less creative category (27.2 %), 16
students in the quite creative category (36.4%), 16 students in the creative category (36.4%), meanwhile
there was none in highly creative category. After the treatment, the post-test shows there were 4
students in the highly creative category (9.1%), 29 students in the creative category (65.9%), 11
students in the quite creative category (25%), and none in less creative category. For clearer view
towards students creative thinking ability, the following table 2 can be observed:

Table 2: Students creative thinking ability test

The creative thinking ability indicator percentage recapitulation report during pre-test for fluency
indicator was 47.73%, originality indicator was 68.18%, and elaboration indicator was 50%. Meanwhile
during post-test, the creative thinking ability increased for each indicator. Fluency indicator increased to
66%, originality indicator increased to 77.27% and for elaboration indicator increased to 68.18%.

That data analysis shows that creative thinking for all indicators increased after the students taught using
discovery learning model. Therefore, from that research it can be said that discovery learning model is
effective for physics learning and teaching because this model can give opportunity to students to search
and discover the principles of the problems they faced. By using discovery learning model, students are
involved directly in learning the problems, to find the answer through searching and discovering the
problem. This research is in tune with the opinion of Zydney et al., (2012) that stated discovery learning
model gives room for students to learn in making decision and to make new competency.

4. Conclusion

From the research analysis, it can be concluded that discovery learning model can encourage students’
creative thinking ability in learning and teaching strategy subject. This can be seen from the decreasing
number of students categorized as less creative, from 27.3% during pre-test to 0% during post-test, and
the increasing number of students categorized as highly creative, from 0% to 9.1%. There has been an
increase in average score of creativity level of 16.73 points. This research implies that using discovery
learning model is one of the options to enhance students creative thinking ability. This learning model
should be implemented in various field of education. Research with the same topic should be conducted
in the future, with variability of the subject education level or different education institution settings.

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ISSN 2520-0968 (Online), ISSN 2409-1294 (Print), October 2017, Vol.4, No.2 (Special Issue)

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