The effectiveness of the Creative Reversal Act (CREACT) on students’ creative thinking

A research study using one-group pretest–posttest design was carried out on the effectiveness of the Creative Reversal Act (CREACT) on creative thinking. The CREACT is a new, teaching technique developed based on the theory of the janusian process. The research participants included 34 students who were attending 10th grade at a social studies high school. Six lessons with each lesson having one focus concept were designed using the CREACT. These lessons were taught to students in their language arts courses. The overall study took 5 weeks, three for the instruction and two for the pretests and posttests. Students were given a poem task, story task and a paradoxes task as pretests and posttests. Comparison of pretest and posttest scores showed that the use of the CREACT improved students’ creative performance significantly on the poem and story tasks, but had a low effect on their creative performance on the paradoxes task. Results show that the CREACT has potential as a new teaching technique for creative thinking.