<![CDATA[Natural resource management confronts geography learners with ill-structured problems in which economic, social, and ecological interests compete across places and scales, yet school geography often reduces these topics to inventories of location and distribution. This study examined whether Creative Problem Solving, organized through the Teachmint learning management system, improves students' creative thinking about such problems, and how gains differ across creative thinking components. A quasi-experimental nonequivalent pretest–posttest control group design was used with two intact Grade XI social science classes at an Islamic senior high school in Singosari, East Java, Indonesia. One class (n = 39) learned through Teachmint-assisted Creative Problem Solving and the other (n = 42) through the scientific approach. Lessons addressed Indonesia's marine, mining, forestry, and tourism resources. Creative thinking was measured with five open-ended essay items scored for fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration, and normalized gains were compared with an independent samples t-test. The experimental class achieved significantly larger gains (mean normalized gain 0.61 vs. 0.42; p < .001) and a higher posttest mean (82.4 vs. 73.9). The largest between-class difference was in originality, whereas elaboration remained low in both classes. Organizing the stages of Creative Problem Solving through a learning platform can help students generate more varied and original responses to resource conflicts, although the design does not separate the model's effect from the platform's. For geography education, natural resource topics can be taught as ill-structured problems that call for creative geographical reasoning, with explicit support for elaboration.]]>
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