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Building 21st Century Skills: IEL to evaluate intervention to promote creativity in children
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Many training programs have aimed to improve creative thinking abilities in various
settings. The study of relevant literature revealed a relatively lower number of creativity programs for children compared to those developed for adults. The current work introduces a new and comprehensive nine-week long creativity intervention program that was implemented (out of school-setting) in 8- to 11-year-old children of socio-economically disadvantaged families in Turkey. The intervention program was composed of nine activities: (1) Collection making, (2) Identity box, (3) Saving the information in unusual ways, (4) Designing an object, (5) Drawing a sensory map, (6) Designing a space, (7) Visual storytelling, (8) Exploring an imaginary planet, (9) Finding creative and constructive solutions to a social conflict. Children (n= 159) were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups and they took the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking both prior to and after the intervention. Results showed that compared to the control group, children in the experimental group had significantly higher verbal fluency and originality scores at the post-test. These results provide further evidence for the trainability of creativity and introduce a novel affordable creativity intervention program that is feasible enough to be implemented in and out of the school-setting. Reference: Balci, F., Baykal, E., Goksun, T., Kisbu-Sakarya, Y. Yantac, E. (in press, 2022). Improving creative thinking in elementary school children from disadvantaged families: A randomized trial. Journal of Creativity Research. |