Fostering Young Children’s Divergent Thinking Through Guided Play

• In Event: Creativity in Childhood: Contexts and Conditions That Foster Children’s Creativity and Innovative Abilities

Abstract

In this day and age, complex problems are arising at an unexpected rate, and future generations need to be prepared to generate creative solutions. How can we promote children’s creativity? Different types of play impact children’s learning and creativity (Russ, 2016; Weisberg, Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, 2013). It is less known how differing levels of adult involvement during play can impact children’s divergent thinking, a critical component of creativity (Runco & Acur, 2012). Divergent thinking, a standard measure for creativity (Said-Metwaly et al., 2017), refers to the ability to generate multiple original ideas. The current study examines how free play (child-directed), guided play (child-directed but adult assisted), and direct instruction (adult-directed) may affect divergent thinking performance on a subsequent task. We predicted that children who engaged in guided play would perform best on later divergent thinking measures because guided play provides an optimal balance of child agency and adult support (Hirsh-Pasek, et al. 2015).

Ninety-eight 4- to 6-year-olds built LEGO brick castles under free play, direct instruction, or guided play conditions. In free play, children were told to build whatever they pleased (a castle was suggested). In direct instruction, children followed instructions to build a castle and mistakes were immediately corrected. In guided play, children built a castle without step-by-step instructions but the experimenter gently offered hints and suggestions rather than immediate corrections. A creative problem-solving task was then given to measure children’s divergent thinking. Children were scored for fluency, the total number of actions they performed during the task, and originality, the number of unique actions they performed during the task. Videos were double coded for inter-rater reliability (Cohen’s kappa = .86).

A planned-contrast ANOVA revealed a main effect of condition on fluency, F(2, 95) = 3.57, p = 0.04, η2 = 0.07, with planned contrasts indicating that children in the guided play condition demonstrated significantly higher fluency scores (Figure 1) than those in the direct instruction and free play conditions, t(95) = 2.49, p = .01. A Kruskal-Wallis test found condition differences in originality, and significant differences, Χ2 (2, N = 98) = 8.151, p = .02, with pairwise comparisons revealing a significant difference between guided play and direct instruction, p = .01. Although the guided play condition demonstrated higher originality scores than the free play condition (Figure 2), pairwise comparisons indicated that this difference was not significant, p = .23.

Guided play provided adult support for children trying new ideas during LEGO building, which related to higher fluency and originality scores on the divergent thinking measure relative to the other conditions. Guided play balances adult support with child autonomy, which may empower children to generate their own solutions to creative problems without worrying about being “wrong” (Fyfe, et al., 2016). Finding the balance between child agency and adult support is the essence of guided play’s formula for promoting children’s creativity.

Authors

• Natalie Evans, University of Virginia - Charlottesville
  Presenting Author

• Rachael Todaro, Temple University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Molly Schlesinger, Temple University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Roberta M Golinkoff, University of Delaware
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kathy A Hirsh-Pasek, Temple University
  Non-Presenting Author