A Comparison of Thinking Styles and Emotional Creativity between Gifted and Ordinary Students

Abstract

The present research aims to study the differencesin thinking styles and emotional creativity in gifted and ordinary 1st-gradehigh school studentsin Urmia city. The research method was that ofcausal-comparative. Using multi-stage cluster sampling method, 400 subjects(including 200 gifted, 200 ordinary ones) were selected from among the 1st-gradehigh school students in Urmia. The Thinking Styles Inventory (Sternberg, 1994)and the Emotional Creativity Inventory (Averill, 1994) were carried out onthem. The data were analyzed using multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). The results showed that there was a significantdifference between ordinary and gifted students in their emotional creativityand thinking styles. The mean of legislative and judicial thinking styles ingifted students were higher than that of ordinary students. Moreover, the meanof executive, global, local, and conservative thinking styles in ordinarystudents were higher than that of gifted students. Generally, the resultssuggest that the interaction between thinking styles and emotional creativityis an important factor in students’ individual learning differences. Althoughthe results of this research are exploratory in nature, they have practicalimplications

Keywords

• emotional creativity
• thinking styles
• gifted students