Promoting Chinese Students’ Creative Performance Through Collaborative Reasoning

Purpose: Creativity is highly valued by modern society; however, in China, there is a major challenge in creating school-based curricula or courses that promote students’ creativity. This study introduced an interactive learning format called Collaborative Reasoning (CR). The goal was to investigate whether CR would improve a student's ability to generate creative ideas. Design/Approach/Methods: The data comprised 474 seventh graders from eight classes in a rural middle school in northern China. The eight classes were randomly assigned to two conditions: Four classes participated in CR discussions, and the remaining four classes were taught via teacher-directed Chinese reading classes. After participating in the CR discussions, students completed a Realistic Presented Problem test that was designed to evaluate their creative performance. Findings: The results indicated that compared to the control students, CR students generated more effective solutions (fluency) and proposed a greater variety of solutions (flexibility) to three realistic problems. The solutions proposed by the CR students were more unique (novelty) and more useful in real-life situations (usefulness) than those proposed by the control group. Originality/Value: Providing abundant opportunities for the exchange of ideas in a social context can boost students’ performance in creative problem-solving.