The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of a creative dance program on the development of children's creativity such as openness, fluency, flexibility, originality, and organization,
The Creative Dance Program was composed of Laban's basi...
The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of a creative dance program on the development of children's creativity such as openness, fluency, flexibility, originality, and organization,
The Creative Dance Program was composed of Laban's basic movement elements(time, space, force, and relationship), Labanotation, relevant data, and the results of previous research. It consisted of 36 40-minute lesson units. The Program was reviewed three times for its content and construct validity by 5 elementary dance specialists and 50 elementary school teachers. The Program was also pilot-tested for its reliability by administering it to 80 elementary school students.
The subjects of this study were 220 elementary school students: 110 the for control group, 110 for the experiment group, respectively. the experiment group wart subjected to the 12-week Creative dance Program 3 times a week, while the control group received normal physical education lessons. The Program was applied based on the following sequences: Stage I - body Awareness, Stage II - Movement Awareness, Stage III - Improvisation and Imagination, Stage IV - Movement Code.
The instrument to measure children' creativity was developed by modifying and adapting Guilford's(1975), Torrance's(1970), and Jung & Lee's(1986) Creativity Inventories. The reliability of the instrument by category ranged from. 7 to .9.
Data collected from pre- and post tests were subjected to t-tests to test for significant differences both between groups and between gender Two-way analysis of variance were applied to examine the interaction effects by grouts and sender.
The results of this study can be summarized as follows :
First, the experiment grouts which had gone through The Creative dance Program showed higher creativity scores than the control group after completing the program.
Second, when the pretest scores were compared with the posttest scores, male students showed greater improvement on creativity scores than their female counterparts.
Third, there were no group-gender interaction effects in the posttest scores.
In conclusion, this study showed that The Creative Dance Program could improve the creativity of elementary school students. This might work as a way of ensuring the status of dance as a meaningful subject in the elementary school.