Promoting creativity in early childhood education

• How did the 2013 Preschool Education Programme contribute to the development of crea- tivity and creative thinking of children? Materials and method The research design This study, which has been conducted to determine strategies to promote creative thinking in the preschool stage, and to create suggestions for solutions, used the basic qualitative research design, which is a qualitative research pattern. Basic qualitative research aims to find out how participants comprehend their experiences within the scope of the topic studied, and which meanings they place on their experiences [22]. Thus, this method was preferred in this study in order to determine feelings, thoughts, perceptions and experiences of teachers and teacher candidates on the prominence of creativity and the promotion of creative thinking in the pre- school stage, and to study their opinions in more detail. The open-ended questionnaire tem- plate which was developed to get written opinions was used for data collection. A comprehensive literature review was conducted for the study to reach its aims. In addition, the conceptual structure of the subject was stated within the framework of the aims and limitations of the study. Following that, open ended questionnaire forms were prepared for both teachers and teacher candidates as appropriate to the aims of the study. Thus, the purpose was to study in detail the awareness of the participants on the prominence of creativity in the preschool stage and developing creativity as well as the methods they used for this purpose. The study group

The study group consists of preschool teachers who are employed at preschools in the province of Alanya in the city of Antalya, and preschool teacher candidates who were students in their 3rd and 4th year at Akdeniz University, Faculty of Education, Department of Preschool Teach- ing. The 25 preschool teachers and 25 teacher candidates who met this criteria and who partic- ipated in the study group were determined by using the purposive sampling method [23]. The main purpose for preferring this sampling method is that the participants are chosen accord- ing to certain criteria determined by the researchers beforehand [24]. When choosing the par- ticipants among the teacher candidates attending their third and fourth year at university, the main determining factor was that they had taken the classes which were ‘creativity, school experience and/ or teaching practice’. Another point which was given priority during the study was ensuring that preshool teachers and teacher candidates gave sincere answers to the questions which were included in the data collection tool, and which were directed towards the experiences and practices of the participants. For this reason, special care was taken to make sure that the preschool teachers participating in the study had spent a certain amount of time working with the children so that they were able to get to know the children better, and that they could express their experiences more clearly. In addition, special care was taken to ensure that the professional seniority of the teachers were different from each other and that

met the desired criteria in terms of seniority (See. Table 1). The data on the professional seniority of the preschool teachers participating in the study are presented in the table below: Data collection tools When the data collection tool of the research was being prepared, the related regulations and the Ministry of Education Preschool Educational Program [7] was studied as well as the related literature review. As a result of the theoretical knowledge in the related literature and the PLOS ONE Creativity in early childhood PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0294915 December 6, 2023 4 / 21