Effects of Mind Mapping Studies on the Creativity Skills of 60 to 72-month-old Children

Along with the needs of the 21st century, flexible thinking and creativity skills in the education of young children began to gain importance. One of the techniques for supporting the skills of children to think flexibly and generate new ideas and the ability to integrate their knowledge, is motivation through mind mapping. This research which used a pre-test - post-test control group experimental model aimed to examine the effect of the mind mapping program, developed for 60-72-month-old children, on their creativity skills. The research was conducted in two classrooms in preschool education, located in the Kadikoy district of Istanbul. The study group consisted of 47 randomly assigned children of which 26 were experimental group and 21 to the control group. of w The Creative Thinking Skills of the Hybrid Creativity was used as pre-test and post-test measurement of the creativity skills of the children in the research project. Following the pre-tests, members of experimental group were first subjected to five mind mapping studies for the purpose of learning. These studies were carried out once a week and completed within five weeks. Later, for a total of 10 weeks, the children prepared individual mind maps about various subjects. During the week, the children prepared their mind maps at playtime. Post-tests were conducted at the end of the practices, and data was collected. Upon collection of the data, the t-test was implemented on the independent group in order to discover whether there is an important difference in the findings for the experimental and control group through the use of the pretest of the Creative Thinking Skills of the Hybrid Creativity. After analysis, the difference between the arithmetic means of the groups was found to be significant (t=2.29; p