Creativity development in preschoolers: The effects of children’s museum visits and other education environment factors |
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| Institution: | 1. School of Education, Central China Normal University, China;2. Department of Mathematics, University of Houston, United States;3. Teachers College, Columbia University, United States |
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| Abstract: | As one of the potential contextual factors for creativity development, children’s museum has been introduced to China from the western world in recent years, with the aim to offer a new informal educational environment to enhance children’s creativity. Based on experimental data for two groups of 4-year-old preschoolers (218 for the family mode and 202 for the preschool mode) from Beijing with an appropriately one-year long intervention (September 2017 to July 2018), this study examines the effect of regular visits to a children’s museum and other education environmental factors on young children’s creativity measured by Torrance’s Thinking Creatively in Action and Movement (TCAM) test. Results indicate that in terms of family visit, compared to the control group, the intervention that offers 18 times free tickets to visit a children’s museum significantly improved the experiment group’s originality (a sub-measure of creativity) by an additional 34.51 %. A beneficial effect of this intervention was also found in improving children’s fluency from the sample of preschool group visit (46.80 %). In addition, family education environment factors such as public preschool attendance, frequency of visits to science museums, and the degree of parents’ latitude were also found to positively affect creativity. Children’s personal features such as sex and geographic location of the family are also found to be related with children’s creativity. |
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| Keywords: | Creativity Children’s museum Educational effect Parenting China |
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