Information Processing and Creative Thinking Abilities of Residential and Non-Residential School Children: A Pilot Study

This study attempts to assess and compare the residential and non-residential schoolchildren in information-processing skills and creative thinking abilities. A sample of 80 children from Classes 5 and 7 were selected from two types of schools, residential/ashram (02) and non-residential/formal schools (02) in Bolpur subdivision of West Bengal in India where the medium of instruction is Bengali language/mother-tongue. All the children were individually administered the PASS (Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, Successive), Stroop, Matching Familiar Figure Test (MFFT-20), and creative thinking tasks. The residential school children were found to perform better both in information processing and creative thinking tasks. The developmental trend could not be clearly observed due to small sample size, but with increasing age, children were using better processing strategies. Due to ashram environment, creative pedagogy, and various co-curricular activities, the residential school children were found to be more creative than their formal school counterparts. Moreover, some significant positive correlations were found among information processing skills and creative thinking dimensions.