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Effects of Explicit Instruction to “Be Creative” Across Domains and Cultures
Author(s) -
CHEN CHUANSHENG,
KASOF JOSEPH,
HIMSEL AMY,
DMITRIEVA JULIA,
DONG QI,
XUE GUI
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
the journal of creative behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.896
H-Index - 55
eISSN - 2162-6057
pISSN - 0022-0175
DOI - 10.1002/j.2162-6057.2005.tb01252.x
Subject(s) - creativity , clarity , psychology , facilitation , mathematics education , quality (philosophy) , ethnic group , creative writing , cognitive psychology , social psychology , epistemology , literature , sociology , philosophy , art , biochemistry , chemistry , neuroscience , anthropology
To explore whether the facilitation effects of an explicit instruction to “be creative” vary across cultures and types of tasks, 248 U.S. and 278 Chinese college students were administered a battery of tests of verbal, artistic, and mathematical creativity. Half of the participants were tested under the standard condition, and the other half under the explicit instruction condition. Results showed that the facilitation effects of the explicit instruction varied by domains of the creativity tasks (greater for artistic and mathematical creativity than for verbal creativity), but not across cultural and ethnic groups. The explicit instruction had a small “detrimental” effect on the clarity and grammar of story writing, but not on any other aspects of the technical quality of creative products. Methodological and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.