A creative thinking approach to enhancing the web-based problem solving performance of university students

  • Authors:

  • Fan-Ray Kuo;Nian-Shing Chen;Gwo-Jen Hwang

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Information Management, National Sun Yat-Sen University, 70, Lienhai Rd., Kaohsiung, 80424, Taiwan;Department of Information Management, National Sun Yat-Sen University, 70, Lienhai Rd., Kaohsiung, 80424, Taiwan;Graduate Institute of Digital Learning and Education, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, 43, Sec. 4, Keelung Rd., Taipei, 106, Taiwan

  • Venue:
  • Computers & Education
  • Year:
  • 2014

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Abstract

Along with the advancement of information and communication technology, researchers have pointed out the necessity and challenges of developing effective instructional strategies to enhance students' web-based problem-solving performance, which refers to the ability of investigating a series of related problems via searching for, abstracting and summarizing information on the web. In this study, a creative thinking strategy is proposed to cope with this problem. Moreover, an experiment was conducted on 80 freshmen from two classes of a university to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The experimental results show that the proposed approach improved the students' web-based problem solving performance in comparison with the conventional approach in terms of ''problem finding'' and ''idea finding.'' Moreover, it was found that the proposed approach could improve the ''fact finding'' performance of the students with intuitive-type cognitive style. Accordingly, some implications and suggestions are given for educators who attempt to conduct web-based problem-solving activity.