The Effect of Virtual vs. Traditional Classroom Instruction on Creative Thinking of Iranian High School EFL Learners

This study investigated the effect of virtual vs. traditional classroominstruction oncreative thinking among Iranian High school EFL Learners. One-hundred and forty three female of high and low level of proficiency, who were selected randomly, were assigned to two VLI (N = 60) and TCI group (N = 60) based on their scores in OPT. Then, each group were divided into two sub groups (high and low level) randomly in order to evaluate the effect of proficiency of each group on creative thinking. At first, a pre-test of creative thinking was administered for both groups to identify the amount of creative thinking. Then participants of both groups received 14-sessions same language learning English book1 but virtual group taking advantage of weblog while the participants of traditional group learned language in traditional environment. At last, all learners of the study were given a creative thinking test as post-test. Also, this test was administered on sub groups separately. Researcher used a pretest-posttest of Gilford (1976) for measuringlevel of creative thinking of learners. In addition, attitudesquestionnaire on different learning situation (Till, 2004) was used to evaluate attitudes of both VLI and TCI groups. T-test was used to analyze the data, which revealed that total gain in creative thinking domain by VLI and also high VLI subgroups was significantly superior to the total gain in creative thinking domain by other groups. Also, the attitudes of the VLI group participants were also higher than the TCI group participants. The findings of the study can be used as guidelines for designing classroom environments that can improve the creativity of learners.