The purpose of this study was to a design creative and critical thinking skills-reinforced and
STEAM-oriented teaching strategy for junior high school students in Korea. A second purpose
was to investigate its effects on improving students’ creative-thinking and critical-thinking skills
through inquiry. This science teaching strategy was applied to 30 third year junior high school
students who participated in extracurricular activities focused on creative and critical thinking
skills during two semesters through an intervention study program. The experimental group
showed a statistically meaningful improvement in their creative thinking skills (p <.05);
especially, with respect to the sub-elements of their creative thinking skills: both fluency and
originality showed statistically meaningful improvements (p <.05). The experimental students,
however, did not show a statistically meaningful improvement in their flexibility (p >.05). In
their extracurricular activities, the experimental group did show a statistically meaningful
improvement in their inquiry thinking skills (p <.05). Finally, they showed statistically
meaningful improvements (p <.05) especially with respect to the sub-elements of their inquiry
thinking skills: recognition of problems, making hypotheses, control of variables, transformation
and interpretation of data, and making conclusions and generalizations.