Enhancing Students' Creativity by Developing Divergent Thinking Skills: The Influence of Individuals' Knowledge and Ability

• In Event: 66.087 - MTCC Roundtable Session 30
  In Roundtable Session: 66.087-12 - Research on Creativity, Talent Development, and Giftedness

Abstract

Creative thinking, particularly divergent thinking plays an important role in creativity. Training on divergent thinking skills has a potential to improve creativity, although its effectiveness is inclusive. Besides training programs, one’s creativity can be influenced by his/her domain knowledge and personal ability. This study proposed and examined the effects of a training program which helped high school students to develop a set of divergent thinking skills and apply them in science-related creativity tasks. Students’ scientific creativity performance was improved after training. Moreover, students with high levels of both domain knowledge and creativity ideation and those with low levels of both aspects benefited more from the training program than students with low-level domain knowledge but high-level creative ideation.

Authors

• Meng Sun, The University of Hong Kong

• Minhong Wang, The University of Hong Kong

• Jiutong Luo, The University of Hong Kong