The analysis of the thinking styles and creativity of the sports students studying in the different fields of university

This study analyzes the creativity and thinking levels of athletes studying at the different college departments; 61 female and 75 male athletes, a total of 136 ice-hockey players have participated in the research. As data collection tools, Thinking Styles Inventory and The Creativity Scale have been used in the study. SPSS 15.0 for Windows statistics analysis program has been used for the analysis of the collected data. At the end of the analysis of the collected data, we observed that males use the thinking styles more significantly than do females (p<0, 05). In addition to this, it has been determined that there are significant differences in using the thinking styles among athletes, according to fields of study. It has been observed that while social sciences students are using a hierarchical thinking style, the science students are dominantly using legislative, and the sports science students are using the internal thinking style. It has been seen that males have significantly better creative styles than do females (p<0, 05), and the sports science students are significantly better with creative styles than other fields of study (p<0, 05). It has been determined that while some thinking styles are improving creativity, some others are decreasing it. In addition, it has been seen that the ages and genders of the participants have no significant effect on creativity (p<0, 05).


INTRODUCTION
It is compulsory for mankind to strenghen abilities to handle new situations in this turbulently changing world.For this reason, every country needs to educate individuals to develop higher perception and thinking levels so they can use the information properly and fabricate new concepts, as well as find different solutions in a limited time against growing problems and questions.Within this context, creativity and innovation are the center of today's economic and social improvement for new products and services (Zhu and Zgang, 2011).Creativity is an ability that every single individual has and that could be found in all parts of human life; a compound of processes, from daily life activities to scientific fields; and a style of manner and behavior (San, 1979;Tanık, 2007).The society, state, and educational institutions must provide new advantages for students to help them deal with creative thinking circumstances.
Thinking means mental processes that are carried out to comprehend a current situation and purposefully organized phase (Çubukçu, 2004).Thinking process can also be defined as interpreting the objects and events in the outer world into symbols (Arkonaç, 1998).Thinking is the mental presentation process of knowledge; this presentation can be a word, a visual design, a sound, or any kind of idea (Çubukçu, 2004).
The thinking styles can be shaped by the circumstances that individuals experience (Çubukçu, 2004).While some students choose to learn from data, incidents, and algorithms, others choose to learn from theoretical and mathematical models; while some learn via schemes, graphics, and pictures, others choose to learn written and oral explanations in an interactive manner.It could easily be said the students studying in social sciences, natural sciences, and sports sciences can have different styles of learning and as a consequence they can have different thinking styles (Çubukçu, 2004).
Creativity is especially important in team sports to gain success (Memmert and Roth, 2007).It is emphasized in a literature review study that creativity is learned and stored at early ages (Milgram, 1990).The individuals generally start sports during the ages of 8-10, thus they meet the activities involving creativity in the early ages, when compared to the other students studying in social and natural sciences.The individuals studying in the sport sciences can be more creative in the upcoming years as they meet activities involving creativity during their early ages.
Many scholars have discussed the importance of intellectual styles in creativity (Noppe, 1996;Selby et al., 2005).The research of Zhang (2004) and Sternberg (2005) suggested that some thinking styles are more creativity-generating while other thinking styles are more norm-favoring.Accessible study specifies that there is a necessity to understand how creativity is considered and how thinking styles are related to conceptions of creativity.Although literature proposes some link between creativity and thinking styles (Farrell, 2001;John-Steiner, 2000), empirical evidence is required for this conceptual link.
Thinking styles cannot be classified as good or bad.Rather, it can be said that some thinking styles can be more effective than the others during an individual's learning process.It is believed that gaining qualified thinking styles that will enable the individuals to solve problems in a creative way and adopt them to new circumstances is quite important.Thinking styles and creativity are considered part individual differences, and also they can vary in the fields of different sciences.For that reason, it is seen as a requirement to research the differences of creative abilities and thinking styles of social, natural, and sport sciences students and the relationship of these specialties.The purpose of this study is to analyze the levels of creative and thinking styles of the university students studying in the different fields.

Participants
In total, 136 Turkish university students from seven universities in Turkey participated in this study.The students who participated in the research were selected from sportsmen/ sportswomen who are interested in ice hockey at these universities.As the total number of students who are studying ice hockey is 136, the whole population of research was included in the study.Participants were from bachelor studies and from different disciplines, including social sciences, sciences, and sport sciences.Among them, 61 students were females and 75 students were males.The average age of the students was 21.45 years.With regard to the fields of study, 52 students were from social sciences, 19 students were from science studies, and 65 students were from sport sciences.

Instruments Thinking Styles Inventory (TSI)
First used in this study is the TSI (Sternberg and Wagner, 1992), comprising 94 statements.This inventory assesses the 13 thinking styles (Legislative, Executive, Judicial, Monarchic, Hierarchical, Oligarchic, Anarchic, Global, Local, Internal, External, Liberal, and Conservative) in Sternberg's theory and was used to identify participants' thinking style in this study.The validity and reliability of the inventory for use in Turkish was conducted by Sünbül (2004) and the inventory comprised 13 sub-dimensions (Sünbül, 2004).As a result of this conducted validity and reliability application, the inventory of Cronbach's alphas were found between .70 and .86.Inventory of Cronbach's alphas for his study were found to be between .63 and .94.So, it can be said that inventory is quite reliable (Cortina, 1993).

Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory (KAI)
The second inventory inquires about creativity style, which is what KAI is used to measure.Adaption-Innovation Inventory was developed by Kirton in 1976.Its scale's adaptation to Turkish was conducted by Cengizhan (1997).The inventory assessment was 5level, Likert type, consisting of strongly disagree, disagree, undetermined, agree, and strongly agree.It reached the total creativity scores related to individuals' problem-solving via assessing the total scores that were used in this research.In this study, the reliablity Cronbach alpha coefficient in terms of KAİ test score is 94.

Data analysis
SPSS 15.0 for Windows Packet programme was used for the analysis of data.Independent t test was used for the comparison of data in terms of scales according to gender.One way Anova analysis was used for the comparison was according to departments where the participants had been studying.To do comparison according to gender and the field of education, Manova analysis was used.

Descriptive results
The means and standard deviations of the KAI and TSI From the point of view of fields of study, while the students studying social sciences have higher scores in the sub scales of Judicial (2.75), Monarchic (2.71), Hierarchical (3.07), Oligarchic (2.81), Local (3.24), External (2.94), and Liberal (2.89); science students have higher scores than the others in the sub scales of Legislative (2.53), and Executive (2.68).Students studying sports have higher scores in the sub scales of Judicial (2.70), Monarchic (2.71), Oligarchic (2.81), Anarchic (2.80), Global (3.16), Internal (3.05), and Conservative (3.73).In the scale of creativity, males (3.66) and students studying sports (3.73) have higher scores.After these average score differences in the groups have been shown in the scales of thinking styles and creativity, MANOVA analysis is done to test whether these differences are meaningful (

Discussion
This study has been conducted to analyze the relationship between the thinking styles and creativity according to gender and fields of study of the students and their studying different fields.Differences have been found between creativity and thinking styles of participants, according to gender and fields of study.Also, significant relationships are present between creativity and thinking styles.
It has been shown in this study that male students have used almost every thinking style more than have females.The female participants have only used judicial thinking style more than males.It has been found out that there have been differences between the thinking styles of males and females in the literature reviews, with males are using thinking styles better than have females (Zhang and Zhu, 2011;Çubukçu, 2004;Dinçer and Saracoğlu, 2011).
In literature, it is known that there are a lot of studies in which thinking styles are discussed according to the variable of gender (Demir and Osmanoğlu, 2013).It is also present that there are differences between the thinking styles of males and females (Yanlıç et al., 2012;Tortop et al., 2012) or females are using some thinking styles better than males (Emir, 2011).Zhang and Zhu (2011) have expressed that the increase of knowledge raises the usage of thinking styles (Zhang and Zhu, 2011).Even if the females are academically successful, as they usually study by using memorization method, this method can cause low knowledge levels and information levels and, in addition, it can be said that they use thinking styles less due to their low knowledge level.
According to fields of study, science students dominantly use legislative and executive thinking styles.Social science students widely use local, external, liberal and hierarchical thinking styles.Sports science students dominantly use anarchic, global, internal, and conservative thinking styles, when compared to other fields.
The use of judicial, monarchic, and oligarchic thinking styles are similar for social and sport science students.When the dominant thinking styles are carefully observed, it can be easily seen that the students possess the thinking styles that are suitable for the nature of their fields.We can exemplify that matter in that social science students use hierarchical, science students use legislative, and sports science students use internal thinking styles.It has been determined in the many literature reviews that there is a difference in the state of students' using thinking styles according to their education programs (Clarke et al., 2010;Çubukçu, 2004;Dinçer and Saracoğlu, 2011).Besides, it is known that being grown up and living in different socio-cultural environments has a considerable effect on the changing of thinking styles (Yıldızlar, 2010).
It has also been discovered that social science and art students use thinking styles better than do science students (Zhang and Zhu, 2011).There are similarities between our research and studies found in the literature.Because science students usually do experimental studies, they are more interested in the structures of the matter, so they greatly need theoretical knowledge.It is thought that this situation can cause them to use and need less thinking styles.
One of the significant findings of this study is that males are more creative than females.In another study it has been found out that females are more creative (Çakmak, 2010).Another study shows us that there are no significant differences in the levels of creativity and thinking of males and females (Argün and Akay, 2010), but Zhang and Zhu (2011) express that males have more creative attitudes.Creativity is a part of life.To make specific decisions can improve creativity (Sternberg, 2003).However, creativity has being improved according to needs of human beings.The interaction of males with the activities involving creativity can be one of the significant reasons of males' creativity.However, the difference between males' and females' creativity cannot only be explained with this single factor.The studies that will be conducted in the future can illuminate this subject.
When it is evaluated according to fields of study, sports science students have best creativity abilities.In literature, it is stated that participation in sport affects many sub-dimension of creativity and the creativity level of individuals who are doing sports is higher than the sedentary individuals (Tekin and Taşğın, 2008).Actually, creativity is more used in fine arts (Robinson, 2001).The individuals in the fields of fine arts use creativity much more because the produced ideas are directly reflected to the ongoing activity.The students studying in the fields of sports (especially team sports) always work on new training systems to contribute to the improvement of the sports.The high creativity levels of the sports science students when compared to social science and science students can be explained by this matter.Also, as social science and science students have been studying much more on the incidents (social, chemical, and physical) or situations, they mostly focus on the events more than creative ideas.As it is mentioned above, it is exactly the opposite for the sport science students.
It has been determined in this study that while hierarchical, external, and monarchic thinking styles are improving creativity, executive, anarchic, and local thinking styles are decreasing it.Age and gender have no significant effect on creativity.It is evident in the literature review that while some thinking styles are improving creativity, some thinking styles are decreasing it (Zhang and Zhu, 2011).
It is known that the ones who use thinking styles better, the more creative they are (Zhang, 2002).Creativity has no meaning alone.It must not be forgotten that there is a crucial need for intelligence to be able to develop emerging ideas (Zhang and Zhu, 2011).It can be said that the inefficient use of thinking styles negatively affects creativity.On the other hand, gender has significant effect on creativity (Barkul and Potur, 2009).

Conclusion
Qualified and effective thinking is a basic feature that makes people active in life and be closer to independent learning.Every human being thinks, but what matters most is to be aware of one's own thinking style as well as thinking effectively (Demir and Osmanoğlu, 2013).
It can be claimed that in the light of findings of this study and the literature reviews, there are differences in creativity and thinking styles of individuals according to gender and fields of study.When it comes to fields of study, every individual has different thinking styles and levels of creativity, and it is essential that the creativity and thinking styles of individuals must be determined and they had better be encouraged toward the education programs according to the thinking styles that they possess.Especially in the universities where there are many students from various cultures, the thinking styles of the students must be determined and must be focused on the courses according to their thinking styles.It is also believed that, in addition to the thinking styles of the students, teachers and tutors ought to use appropriate thinking styles in the classroom atmosphere.It has been mentioned in the literature that there is a strong connection between creativity and thinking styles.It is argued that creativity is essential in the education system (Sandria, 2013).The relationship between creativity and thinking styles should not be forgotten, and these features must be carefully analyzed and used for the encouragement of the individuals for their lives.

Table 1 .
Descriptive statistics for TSI and CSS.When Table1is analyzed, it can be said that the average scores gained from the scales from the point of view of gender and thinking styles that while males have higher scores in the sub scales of Legislative (2.55), by sample groups of each scale are reported in Table1.

Table 2 )
. Results are reported based on students' gender and fields of study.We present mean standard deviations and MANOVA results, including multivariate and univariate statistics, whether they indicate significance different by selected (gender, fields of study, and gender*fields of study) variables.In order to test the group differences by gender fields of study and gender*fields of study, MANOVA analyses were conducted and the results are reported in Table 2. R2=.85; (F15, 120=45.65;P=0.0)related to regression model given in Table.As it can be seen in Table3 while

Table 2 .
MANOVA results for group differences in thinking styles and creativity.

Table 3 .
The results of standard multiple regression analysis related to the effect of thinking styles to creativity scores.