The Relationship Between Thinking Skills and Creativity Among Students

All humans have thoughts, with only their combination and thinking methods being different. Thus educational systems should provide a field for development and growth of thinking methods and creativity. The main purpose of this research was to study the relationship between thinking skills and creativity among students at Kashan University of Medical Sciences.
We used a cross-correlation method. All students at Kashan University of Medical Sciences in the academic year of 2014-2015 (N = 2095) were selected as the study population. Overall, 169 students were chosen using Cochran Formula with stratified random sampling. For data collection, thinking skills questionnaire with 40 items in five components and creativity questionnaire with 20 items scored on a five-point Likert scale were used. Questionnaires content validity was confirmed by experts. Questionnaire reliability through Cronbach alpha coefficient was estimated as equal to 0.84 for thinking skills and 0.87 for creativity. Data were analyzed by descriptive and inferential statistics using SPSS 19 software.
The findings showed that mean thinking skills (3.67 ± 0.43) and creativity (3.68 ± 0.40) were higher than average. Also, there was a positive and significant relationship (r = 0.72) between thinking skills components and creativity (P Means of thinking skills and creativity were higher than average and were desirable. Due to the high level of thinking skills and creativity of students and a significant positive relationship between these two variables, it is suggested that university managers should focus their attention to foster thinking skills in their students to provide grounds for creativity so that the students could be thoughtful, creative and innovative in the society.