The Effects of Inventive Thinking Programme on Bahasa Melayu Students’ Inventive Thinking Ability and Dispositions

Abstract

Inventive Thinking has been identified as one of the core skills needed by the workforce in the 21^st Century. As a result, there have been numerous efforts to develop various teaching and learning programmes that could empower students’ ability in thinking inventively. This study aimed to (1) record and explore, that is by using a series of inferential statistical analyses by means of the Solomon Four-Group Design, of any shift in the participants’ Inventive Thinking abilities and dispositions after the introduction of an intervention programme; and (2) give insights thus, to evaluate the ‘effectiveness’ of the developed intervention programme which was incorporated in the Bahasa Melayu classes. A total of 125 students enrolled in the Bahasa Melayu Brunei-Cambridge GCE A Level in Negara Brunei Darussalam participated in the study. In this study, their Inventive Thinking abilities and dispositions were measured by using The Inventive Problem Solving Quiz and The Inventive Thinking Survey Form pre and post interventions. As a result, the intervention programme contributed to the poorer performance at the quiz by the participants in the experiment group (M = 42.2, SD = 8.9) as compared to those in the control group (M=45.8, SD = 5.9), F (1,121) = 5.5, p = .02). Interestingly, it was the experiment group who outperformed the other group in The Inventive Thinking Survey Form (M = 2.8, SD = .29, as opposed to M = 2.7, SD = .4; F (48, 1) = 5.9, p = .02).