Instructing children to construct ideas into products alters children's creative idea selection in a randomized field experiment.

ABSTRACT: Many popular pedagogical approaches instruct children to construct their ideas into tangible and physical products. With the prospect of implementation, do children decide to go for the most creative ideas or do they shift towards ideas that are perhaps less creative but easier to construct? We conducted a field experiment to test whether expected construction affects children's creative idea selection. In this experiment, 403 children were asked to select the most original ideas to make a toy elephant more fun to play with. We randomly assigned them to a treatment condition-in which they were informed they had to construct one of the original ideas that they selected-and a control group-in which children were informed that, after idea selection, they had to perform another task. Children

SUBMITTER: van Broekhoven K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9352014 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature