Arab Educational Information Network

This study aimed at identifying creative thinking skills that should be included in life and sciences books for basic grade. It also aimed at finding out the scope of creative thinking exercises included in life and sciences books for basic grade and defining the extent of acquiring creative thinking skills included in life and sciences books by fourth grade students. This study adopted the descriptive analytical approach and content analysis method. The study sample was divided into two categories; the first one consisted of (4) books of life and sciences subjects specified for third and fourth grade students during the scholastic year (2017/2018). The second category consisted of (200) male and female students from fourth grade classes selected by cluster sampling. The study tools contained the following: a list of creative thinking skills, content analysis card, and a test for measuring the acquired creative thinking skills included in life and science books for third and fourth grades by fourth grade students. The study concluded with several results, the most important of which are that: creative thinking skills that should be included in life and sciences books for third and fourth grade are assembled in four basic skills, which are fluency, flexibility, originality, and problem sensitivity. Results indicated that the inclusion degree of the four skills was ranked first, followed by originality skill, then fluency skills, and finally problem sensitivity skill. Results also revealed that the level of acquiring creative thinking skills by fourth grade students was (65.025%). In this respect, the originality skill was ranked first among the acquired skills with (69.65%), followed by flexibility skill (66.65%), then fluency skill (60.94%), and finally problem sensitivity skill (58.96%). Furthermore, results indicated that there were differences among the mean scores of fourth grade students in the test of creative thinking skills that can be attributed to sex variable in favor of females. However, there were no differences that can be attributed to the "school" variable or interaction between the school and sex type. In its recommendations, the study stresses on the importance of diversifying creative thinking exercises and encouraging teachers to enrich the study content with exercises that comply with students' inclinations and characteristic. (Author's abstract)