Augmenting Children's Creative Self-Efficacy and Performance through Enactment-Based Animated Storytelling

Abstract

At around age nine when social awareness and self-evaluation heighten, children experience a precipitous slump in creative engagement. We propose an enactment-based approach grounded in embodied cognition theories to support children's creative self-efficacy and creative thinking in storytelling during the period of this slump. Our investigation of the approach with 20 children indicated that enactment-based animated authoring improves children's sense of self-efficacy in creating stories, particularly for children with low to medium extraversion, and enables children to produce richer stories, especially for children who scored low on the baseline creativity test.