Creativity in Children’s Writing
Abstract
In this master thesis the author tests three different story writing approaches to determine which best prompts students’ creativity. The three approaches include: tall tales, actual experiences, and suggested topics. Twenty 6th grade students wrote creative stories in one of the three approaches. The researcher made it clear that students’ stories not be graded, and would not impact their grade report in any way. Three different teachers independently scored each story for its creativity. The researcher found that writing about actual experiences seemed to stimulate the most creativity from students. Tall tales yielded the same level of creativity as suggested topics, however both yielded less than actual experiences. The study also suggests that lower-performing students tended to write the most creative stories, while high-performing students tended to write the least creative stories.Description
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