Revista Argentina de Clínica Psicológica 2020, Vol. XXIX, N°2, 657-663
DOI: 10.24205/03276716.2020.292 657
P
SYCHOLOGY
-B
ASED
C
ULTIVATION OF
C
OLLEGE
S
TUDENTS WITH
I
NNOVATIVE
T
HINKING
Jingjun Yao
Abstract
In the new era, it is an important task to promote the innovative thinking of students through college education. This paper explores the cultivation of the innovative thinking for college students from the perspective of psychology. First, a questionnaire survey was carried out among students from a university in Beijing, China, by random sampling. Based on the survey data, the psychological mechanism of college students in the cultivation of the innovative thinking was discussed from four aspects: active communication, teaching cognition, deep processing, and learning experience. Finally, some suggestions were put forward to promote the cultivation of college students with innovative thinking. The results show that, during the cultivation of innovative thinking, the college students generally have low or medium psychological level, and the cultivation mode needs further improvement; there are some problems with the cultivation of innovative thinking for college students, such as the lack of learning interest, insufficient study time, poor learning efficiency, undesirable learning quality, and the shallow understanding of the learning contents. The research findings provide a reference for applying psychological mechanism in college education.
Key words: Innovative Thinking, College Students, Psychological Mechanism, Education. Received: 29-03-19 | Accepted: 27-09-19
INTRODUCTION
Following the continuous development of society, the demand for talents has increased. In a new stage of reform and innovation, our country needs the innovative talents. It requires the higher education to establish the concept of cultivating talents, especially the innovative talents, and focus on the integration of cross-disciplines (Sun, Yu, & Wang, 2014; Ahuna, Tinnesz, & Vanzile-Tamsen, 2011; Muran, Kassinove, Ross et al., 1989). Innovative thinking education can help to improve the training mode of talents in colleges and universities. The systematic and scientific education and training for college students can fully develop their thoughts, morality, values, personality, body and mind (Merges & Marx, 1971, Ashmore, Griffo, Green et
School of Foreign Languages, Yancheng Teachers University, Yancheng 224700, China.
E-Mail: [email protected]
al., 2007). In addition, innovative education is conductive to alleviating the difficulty of college students' employment and maintain social stability (Ransdell, 1995; Wang, Li, Hong et al., 2012).
Studies on innovative education at home and abroad have been carried out at multiple levels and multiple perspectives, and have achieved many good research results (Lao & Rosina, 1970; Jensen & Worth, 2014; Sommerich, Sesek, Stone et al., 2010). However, there still exist some shortcomings in the research. For the innovative education of contemporary college students, the definition of its concept is not standardized enough and fails to reveal the scientific meaning of contemporary college students' innovative education (Sommerich, Sesek, Stone et al., 2010; Kagee, Allie, & Lesch, 2010). And the innovative education, the knowledge, ability and quality are often mixed up; the problems in innovation education are not analysed and summarized from the perspective of psychology, i.e., the
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psychological needs of students and teachers (Lynd-Balta, 2006; Rogers & Molina, 2006).
Based on the above, with reference to the literatures at home and abroad, this paper attempts to study the psychological mechanism of college students' innovative thinking education from the four dimensions of active communication, teaching cognition, deep processing level, and learning experience using the questionnaire survey was adopted. Finally, it proposes some suggestions on college students' innovative education based on the psychology.
COLLEGE STUDENTS' INNOVATIVE THINKING EDUCATION
Overview of innovative education
Innovative education is a brand-new concept. With the innovation as the core, it aims to cultivate comprehensive talents with strong innovation sense and innovation ability. Under the country's demand for innovative talents, innovative education should emphasize on developing the creativity, independence, critical ability, and practical ability of talents, which is an urgent problem to be solved in the current era and the national higher education background (Mulvihill & Swaminathan, 2012). In this context, the targeted education should be conducted to cultivate the college students mainly from the four aspects mentioned above: creativity, independence, critical ability and practical ability.
The creativity is the premise of accomplishing creative activities. It requires a combination of
highly developed intelligence, highly
accumulated experience, and a perfect
personality. Creativity is also the process of
thinking from point to line and then to face, and from the initial idea to the final generation of new things. For this, it should have three qualities: the first is the accumulation of knowledge and the second deep learning of existing knowledge, for rich knowledge s directly proportional to the creativity; the second is intelligence, including the flexibility and versatility of thinking, qualitative changes on the basis of the original knowledge, and a strong logical thinking ability so that one can see through the appearance to perceive the essence; the third is personality, because the strong will power and desire to seek knowledge is the basis and premise of creativity.
Critical ability is also an important evaluation criterion in innovative education. Critical ability refers to the reflection and analysis of things in the process of thinking, rational analysis of objective facts, and the demonstration of the authenticity of things through the cognitive feelings and conjectures of things. It mainly includes analysis, assessment, inference, explanation, calibration and so on. Besides, the ability of independence is also needed in the innovative education. Independent thinking reflects one's subjective initiative, enabling the them to actively think and identify problems in the process of cognition, and look at things in a critical way. Nowadays, college students' independent thinking ability is generally poor, resulting in a low judgment and creativity. As a new force of the country, they cannot do without independent thinking.
College students' innovative thinking
education concept
Figure 1
.
Innovative education target system
Innovation target system
Non-profit objectives
Profit target
Innovative practice
Business practice Innovation ability
Creative spirit
Innovative thinking
Social needs Personal planning
PSYCHOLOGY-BASED CULTIVATION OF COLLEGE STUDENTS WITH INNOVATIVE THINKING 659
There are already very perfect innovative education systems in foreign countries, from elementary school to junior high school to postgraduate students. The education of college students' innovative thinking in China is the requirement of modern higher education, and also the result of affirming the innovation ability of college students. The innovative education is a new mode of education, aiming to cultivate the innovative thinking, innovative knowledge, innovative skills, innovative consciousness, innovative environment, profound professional knowledge, and strong quality of college students. It has generally two value-oriented goals: the profit goal to create value for enterprises, and the non-profit goal to cultivate innovation consciousness, as shown in Figure 1.
Innovative education involves financial support, communication platform, goal planning and development ideas, which can provide a platform for innovative exchanges among college students so that they can not only learn innovative knowledge, but also exchange experiences and accumulate contacts. In addition, relevant policies introduced from abroad can promote and guide college students to carry out innovative exchanges, perform various types of school-enterprise cooperation mode, and actively implement innovative ideas through social practice.
Based on the forming mechanism of innovation ability, the colleges and universities
should be equipped with corresponding service system, infrastructure, etc. Through the construction of entrepreneurial innovation bases, talent incubation bases, etc., students are allowed to cultivate their thinking and hands-on ability; through the appointment of experienced teachers, it can give full play to teachers' knowledge and experience, provide intellectual support for students, and effectively guide students' innovative ability and psychological changes in the guiding process of teachers. The setting of innovative courses is in line with the needs of social development. It should focus on broadening the knowledge of students, and social practice, so as to improve students' ability of solving problems, quality of innovation, and ability to innovate.
ANALYSIS OF COLLEGE STUDENTS’ INNOVATIVE
THINKING EDUCATION BASED ON PSYCHOLOGY
Questionnaires and survey respondents
In this study, the questionnaire survey was
conducted. Based on the authoritative
questionnaires at home and abroad, our questionnaire was set according to the innovative level, and measured mainly in four dimensions: active communication, teaching cognition, deep processing, and learning experience. The reliability and validity of the questionnaire were also validated.
Table 1.
Questionnaire content
Serial number Category Question A1
Active communication ability
Enough time should be devoted to learning, while learning efficiency and quality are relatively high.
A2 Frequently ask questions about learning content and take the initiative to find evidence to answer questions.
A3 Frequently spend a certain amount of time rethinking new learning knowledge.
A4 Frequently participate in class discussions and express your opinions. B1
Teaching process experience
Teachers usually encourage students to participate in the teaching process.
B2 Teachers will accept our reasonable suggestions and make appropriate teaching adjustments.
B3 Teachers often encourage students to reflect on their learning situation.
C1
Learning deep processing level
When reading an article, you can understand the core ideas the author wants to express.
C2 When learning new knowledge, we can think about our original knowledge system.
C3 I can organize my knowledge in conceptual maps or mind maps. C4 In the process of learning, we can integrate the knowledge learned in
different courses. D1
Learning process experience
Often feel that learning has a deep sense of personal satisfaction. D2 It's interesting to think that almost all subjects can be devoted to. D3 I feel very excited when I study some academic subjects.
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A 5-point scale method was adopted, namely the "completely agree", "more agree", "agree", "disagree", and "completely disagree", corresponding to the score 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 respectively. The higher score indicates a higher level of innovative education for college students. The setting of the questionnaire is shown in Table 1. Through factor analysis of each dimension, the author explored the education level of college students' innovative thinking and existing problems.
This questionnaire survey used the random sampling method. A total of 946 questionnaires were distributed to undergraduates from a university in Beijing. Among them, 924 questionnaires were recovered, with a recovery rate of 97.67%; after removing invalid questionnaires, 896 questionnaires were valid, with the effective rate of 94.71%. Table 2 shows the major classification of the survey respondents. It can be seen that the engineering students accounted for the highest proportion, up to 31.54%, the liberal arts and science students accounted for 25.04% and 24.7%, respectively, and the artistic students accounted for 18.72%. This indicates that the students in the survey were involved in various majors, and the proportion was relatively balanced in line with the actual situation.
Figure 2
.
Students' major classification
0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4
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Liberal arts Art
Engineering Science
Figure 3 shows the gender ratio and grade distribution in the survey. It can be seen from the figure that there were more freshmen and sophomore students among the respondents, but less senior students, because most senior students are seeking for jobs or participate the internship, which is consistent with the actual
situation; the number of males and females in each grade was basically the same, close to the ratio of 1: 1.
Figure 3
.
The sex ratio and grade
distribution of the respondents
0 25 50 75 100 125 150
136 126
103
75 118
137
114
87
Senior
N
u
m
b
er
Male Female
Freshman Sophomore Junior
Figure 4 shows the survey respondents' participation in activities. It can be seen in the figure that the number of students participating in the activity reached 87.64%, and that not participating only accounted for 12.36%, of which the proportion of students in social practice was 26.17%, that in professional internship was 35.6%, and that of part-time entrepreneurs was 25.87%.
Figure 4
.
Students' participation in activities
0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15 0.20 0.25 0.30 0.35 0.40 0.45
Social practice
P
er
ce
n
ta
g
e
Not participate Professional
practice
Part-time job
Figure 5 shows the survey respondents'
participation in innovation and
entrepreneurship activities. It can be seen from the figure that the number of students who did
not participate in innovation and
PSYCHOLOGY-BASED CULTIVATION OF COLLEGE STUDENTS WITH INNOVATIVE THINKING 661
72.43%, the number of those who participated was only 27.57%, indicating that the school
hasn’t often hosted and popularized the
innovation and entrepreneurship activities, and that students' enthusiasm for participating in innovative activities was not high. Therefore, college students' innovation education needs to be further developed and popularized.
Figure 5
.
Students' participation in
innovation and entrepreneurship activities
0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8
P
er
ce
n
ta
g
e
Not participate
Participation award
Unawarded participation
Analysis for the psychological mechanism of
college students’ innovative education
Figure 6
.
Active communication capability
0 1 2 3 4
A
v
e
ra
g
e
sc
o
re
A4 A2
A1 A3
From Figure 6, it can be seen that the scores of college students in the dimension of active learning and communication were lower, all below 3.5 points, indicating that college students are not good at active learning. This makes it difficult to guarantee their sufficient learning time, learning efficiency and quality, and achieve deep understanding and thinking
about the learning content. Therefore, with knowledge reserve as the prerequisite for innovation, the education of students should firstly focus on actively improving students' learning initiative to grasp substantial knowledge.
From Figure 7, it can be seen that the average score of the teaching process experience reached above 3.8, indicating that in this dimension, students are in a state of passive learning, and have a higher degree of dependence on teachers' teaching. At present,
it’s urgent to turn students from passive learning
to active learning and change their roles to think and solve problems in innovative education.
Figure 7
.
Experience level of teaching
process
0 1 2 3 4 5
A
v
er
ag
e
sc
o
re
B1 B2 B3
Figure 8
.
Learning deep processing level
0 1 2 3 4 5
A
v
er
ag
e
sc
o
re
C4 C2
C1 C3
From Figure 8, it can be seen that the students' deep processing ability was at a medium level, indicating that students have poor ability to integrate, understand, deduct, and
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reason about knowledge during the learning process, and a preliminary understanding and cognitive level of most knowledge learnt without deep thinking and learning so that they cannot integrate the learning content into their own knowledge system; they are not desired to explore the knowledge deeply, because in the university's comfortable learning environment they fail to recognize the importance of knowledge accumulation and learning, know very little about the concept of innovation, and show no thirst for knowledge under certain mental laziness.
From Figure 9, it can be seen that the students' experience of the learning process was generally at a medium level, indicating that the students' involvement in the learning process experience is not high. If the students can actively choose topics of interest, they shall be more interested in learning, and easily achieve the sense of satisfaction in the research process. Therefore, the innovative education should consider setting up topics that are of interest to students, or choosing open topics for them.
Figure 9
.
Learning process experience
0 1 2 3 4 5
A
v
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D1 D2 D3
Suggestions on college students’ innovative
education based on psychology
The survey results show that there exist three main problems in innovative thinking education for college students. First, students have a low ability of active learning, a weak consciousness of active learning, insufficient academic investment, and poor learning quality. Second, the teaching level of teachers needs to be improved. Under the new education mode, higher requirements have been proposed for teaching levels, that is, teachers not only impart
knowledge to students, but also guide them to learn actively, which is necessary for the
students’ comprehensive quality. Third, the
academic atmosphere of universities is lacking; the teaching system and atmosphere need to be further improved, making the students realize that innovative education is a national requirement for talent training from the inside out.
The innovative education for college students should be improved mainly from the following aspects. First, based on the students 'own psychological needs, the colleges should set up courses that are of interest to students, and improve their autonomy in course selection, ensuring that students can choose the course of their own interests. Secondly, in addition to studying, students should be encouraged to participate in innovative activities and social practice activities, so that they can examine their own level in practice. Thirdly, teachers appropriately supervise and guide students to carry out innovative activities and improve students' creative thinking. Fourth, schools should establish appropriate education systems, applying students with proper study pressure and increasing the frequency of students' voluntary participation in activities. The innovative education needs to be improved from the inner needs of students. Teachers should guide students so that students can take the initiative to learn from their hearts, so as to further enhance the innovative thinking education of college students.
CONCLUSIONS
This paper systematically studies the innovative thinking education of college students from the perspective of psychology using the questionnaire survey. The main conclusions are as follows:
The survey results of innovative thinking education for college students indicated that
college students’ active communication and
learning ability was at a low level, while the other three dimensions of teaching experience, deep processing level and learning experience were all at a medium level.
The main problems in the innovative thinking education of colleges and universities are the poor learning initiative of the students, the low level of teachers' innovative teaching, and the lack of school's academic atmosphere.
PSYCHOLOGY-BASED CULTIVATION OF COLLEGE STUDENTS WITH INNOVATIVE THINKING 663
The constructive suggestions for improving college students' innovative thinking education have been put forward from the perspectives of students' psychological needs, teachers' supervision, and the establishment of the school education system.
Acknowledgement
This paper was supported by 2018 annual project: Research on the Cultivation of Innovative Talents in Local Universities from the
Cultural Perspective supported by the
Humanities and Social Sciences Research Planning Fund Project of the Ministry of Education of China (No.: 18YJA880109, Project Leader: Jingjun Yao).
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