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Interaction of the originality of peers’ ideas and students’ openness to experience in predicting creativity in online collaborative groups
Author(s) -
Pi Zhongling,
Hong Jianzhong,
Hu Weiping
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
british journal of educational technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.79
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1467-8535
pISSN - 0007-1013
DOI - 10.1111/bjet.12671
Subject(s) - creativity , openness to experience , originality , psychology , mathematics education , empirical research , social psychology , pedagogy , epistemology , philosophy
There has been growing interest in the possibility that peers’ ideas can stimulate students’ creativity in group contexts. However, empirical research on this issue is limited. This study tested the hypothesis that peers’ ideas and students’ openness to experience would predict student creativity and attention to peers’ ideas. Undergraduate students ( n = 60) completed creative tasks in an online collaborative group in which the ideas of “peers” were pre‐programmed. Mixed ANOVAs showed support for the hypothesis. Specifically, students with higher (but not lower) openness, when exposed to a high (but not low) rate of peers’ original ideas, paid greater attention to those ideas and were more creative. The implication for education is that teachers should encourage students to share more of their original ideas and to pay more attention to peers’ ideas in online collaborative groups.