The purpose of the study was to identify changes of young children’s creativity through analogical reasoning activities. Problem solving ability is based on analogical reasoning which can deduce unknown part through experience in real life. In other words, analogical reasoning refers to applying new situations to similar knowledge that has previously been experienced. It is possible for young children to use analogy, which is related to creativity, through applying teaching techniques with minimizing the demands of the task and maximizing the responsiveness of young children. Therefore, this study aimed to provide an effective teaching method to promote young children’s creativity in classroom.
The researcher assessed ‘Korean Comprehensive Creativity Test for Young Children〔K-CCTYC〕)(Jeon, 2009) with 40 children aged 5-year-olds in a private kindergarten located in Kyongki-Do, South Korea. For the purpose of collecting data, the researcher conducted humorous analogical activities based on four categories such as image, object-object, human-object, transform for 4 weeks (total 8 times). The activities took about 30 minutes each time. For the analysis, the paired t-test on the difference between the ex-ante score and the ex-post score was conducted from the use of SPSS 19.0.
The results of the study were as following: First, after the experiment, there was a significant difference on the fluency, sub element of creativity. Second, there was a significant difference on the originality between pre-test score and post-test score. Third, there was a significant difference on the flexibility of young children. However, there was not a significant difference on the imagination of young children. In sum, this study demonstrates that the activities through analogical reasoning are confirmed to be effective to the improvement of five-year-old children’s creativity mostly. It is expected to apply this practice as a teaching method for improving young children’s creativity in the field of early childhood education.
