The Effect of Creative Drama Activities Performed at the "Design Studies-1" Studio on Development of Creative Thinking Skills of Architecture Students

The aim of this research is determining the effectiveness of teaching methods based on creative drama activities performed at the "Design Studies-1" studio on creative thinking and design skills. The research's work group consisted of 67 students who attended the 15-week Design Studies-1 studio (45 female, 22 male). The research is a one-group pretest-posttest experimental design. The theoretical basis of the research is cognitive creativity. The practices stimulating the imagination and flexible thinking skills with the basis of creative drama were used as the creativity-improving techniques. Based on the assumption that creative thinking is teachable, the hypothesis that the "Design Studies-1" program conducted by the first researcher will improve the students' creative thinking skills was accepted. The data were collected through Creative Thinking Tests (Form A and B), which was developed by Torrance (1974 and 1984) and whose Turkish version was composed by Aslan (1999, 2006). For the data analysis, SPSS 13 program was used. In data analysis, related group t-test and Mann-Whitney U statistical test were applied. The pretest and posttest scores mean of the students were compared and significant positive results were found in favor of posttest between the means of figural fluency, figural originality, abstractness of the titles, expressiveness of the titles, intrinsic visualization, liveliness of imagery, richness of imagery, fantasy, verbal fluency, verbal flexibility and verbal originality.