The Time Magazine named Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, a social network service, 2010's "Person of The Year". Born in 1984, Mark Zuckerberg was driven by 'interest' and 'imagination' to become the youngest billionaire in the world with ...
The Time Magazine named Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, a social network service, 2010's "Person of The Year". Born in 1984, Mark Zuckerberg was driven by 'interest' and 'imagination' to become the youngest billionaire in the world with Facebook currently worth USD 50 billion, approximately KRW 56 trillion. What does the story of Mark Zuckerberg imply to Korean education? Korean education has traditionally placed significant emphasis in gaining admission to top universities. Going forward, the education curriculum needs to change in a way to foster a culture of creativity and innovation as is the case with the curriculum in advanced nations.
The 7th national curriculum aimed to promote creative expression and thinking. Revised in 2007, the art curriculum also placed great focus on 'creative expression' to emphasize creative way of thinking. The field of design helps students to develop imagination and creativity through the process of idea generation and concretization.
However, today's design curriculum places too much emphasis on imitating and memorizing artistic expression techniques to complete a given task. As a result, students' ideas and artistic expressions are not coincidentally too similar and often end up imitating someone else. Result-oriented design curriculum at most specialized high schools in Korea is being criticized for dampening creativity that is fostered through the process of observation and problem solving, causing undesired consequences. Thus a curriculum that encourages how to think is highly desired.
This study aims to find out the effects on creative artistic expression from a design curriculum that incorporate creative thinking techniques. The experiment was carried out on juniors at a specialized high school.
The steps for this study are as follows.
First, a new teaching program was developed through theoretical consideration on creative thinking techniques that was in accordance with the guidelines provided by the specialized high school curriculum and design textbooks. Sixty eight juniors at a specialized high school located in the Kyunggi Province were the subjects of this study and divided into two groups of 34, one being the experimental group and the other being the control group. The new teaching program was taught to the experimental group for a total of eight times.
Second, in order to verify the efficacy of improvement in creative artistic expression capabilities, a measurement scheme was devised in accordance with curriculum evaluation guidelines specified by Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation and Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. Each student's art work was evaluated by the instructor along four factors including topic expression, expression method, modeling element/principle and expression material/instrument used. A qualitative evaluation method was used where each evaluation factor was given a score of either high, medium or low. In addition, self-evaluation and peer-evaluation were used in order to minimize subjective evaluation by the instructor.
Third, SPSS(Statistical Package for Social Science) v14 was used to perform statistical analysis of the collected data. The independent sample t-test, paired-sample t-test and one way multivariate analysis of variance was used for homogeneity test, group disposition change and interaction effects among the subcomponents of the four factors, respectively, in order to derive a statistically significant conclusion.
The findings of this study are summarized as follows.
First, the experimental group exhibited superior improvement than the control group in all subcomponents of the creative artistic expression disposition test. The subcomponents included creative behavior, motivation, planning capability, communication accuracy, communication channel diversity and design-related characteristics.
Second, the experimental group exhibited superior excellency than the control group in all subcomponents of the creative artistic expression measurement test. The subcomponents included topic expression, expression method, modeling element/principle and expression material/instrument used. In conclusion, the new design teaching program that incorporated creative thinking techniques was proven to be statistically significant in promoting creative artistic expression for the experimental group of this study. However, the experiment was conducted on a limited number of students at a specialized high school in a specific region. Therefore, it may be insufficient to draw a general conclusion that the new teaching program will work for all specialized high school students. Nevertheless, given the positive effects demonstrated by this study, the author is hopeful that more design teaching programs will be developed to incorporate creative thinking techniques in various fields(illustration, typography, editorial design, identity design and multimedia design) and curriculum(computer graphics, product design, environmental design, photography and advertisement).