preschool students

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.