The Effectiveness of Teaching Art (Motivational Painting) on Preschool Students' Cognitive Creativity and Social Skills

This research examined the effect of teaching art (motivational painting) on preschool students’ cognitive creativity and social skills. The research design of this quasi-experimental study includeda pretest-posttest with a control group. 60 students aged 6 years old were selected by purposive sampling from all preschools and kindergartens in Tehran and divided into an experimental group (15 boys and 15 girls) and a control group (15 boys and 15 girls). The experimental group was subjected to the teaching art program of motivational paintings (Silver, 2000) for 12 sessions, two sessions a week, each 45 minutes. Cognitive creativity and social skills were measured by the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking [form B, 1974] and the Social Skills Rating Scale of Gresham and Elliot [parents' form, 1990]. The results were analyzed by Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), T-test, and Spearman's correlation coefficient. The findings indicated that motivational painting instruction had significant positive effects on the students’ cognitive creativity (p<0.01) and two subscales of social skills, namely cooperation and responsibility. The research showed that teaching motivational painting can be used by instructors as a useful and productive method to develop new curricula in order to escalate the positive creativity and social skills of learners in pedagogical institutions.