Studying medium effects on children's creative processes

Abstract

The Fourth Grade Slump, whereby children's creativity drops precipitously at around fourth grade, is a developmental phenomenon that begs for research to be done on ways to nurture children's creativity. We posit that due to its form and formal features, the use of the animated medium for creative activities can positively sustain the child's creativity throughout the Slump. We present a study that investigated how the animated medium (animation) mediates and influences the creative process of children in the third and fourth grade, using the digital print medium (storybook) as comparison. Analysis of the process was done at the structural and production level using mainly the method of discourse analysis. Children were observed to go through different stages and sequences when creating stories using animation as opposed to the storybook medium. The strategies that the children adopted to create differed along six themes: the prevalence of micro-activities, an integrated and activity-driven process of story generation, a focus on qualitative details producing richer stories, a broader imagination in terms of the story world, the occurrence of serendipitous creativity, and a higher degree of convergence and divergence despite a low seeding level of ideas in story generation. While animation was seen to have certain limitations in the act of creating, it had a largely positive impact on the children's motivation and enthusiasm to engage in the creative activity. Our results have implications for the understanding of the creative process among elementary school children, a necessary first step for the proper design of systems to nurture and sustain children's creativity throughout the Fourth Grade Slump.