The effectiveness of western creative teaching methods in China: An action research project.

Abstract

A total of 54 students from a design department in a Chinese higher education institution took part in a7-week action research project, which was intended to test the efficacy of U.K. creative teachingapproaches in the Chinese educational context. The study took the form of a quasi-field experiment. Acreative pedagogic model developed in the U.K. was used to deliver the Chinese curriculum to a classof second-year Bachelor of Arts Graphic Design students (the experimental class), while another class ofstudents with similar student composition (the control class) received the traditional Chinese model ofeducation. Visual outcomes produced by students from the two classes before and during the teachingintervention were evaluated for overall creativity, originality, design quality, and experimental range.Levels of student effort, motivation, enjoyment, and confidence in experimentation were measuredthrough a student questionnaire examining the impact of different pedagogic models on student creativeabilities and other related attributes. Both quantitative and qualitative results suggest that the creativemethods developed in the U.K. were highly effective in encouraging learner creativity and relatedattributes such as intrinsic motivation, enjoyment, and confidence.Keywords: creativity, pedogogy, motivationImagination is more important than knowledge, for knowledge islimited whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulatingprogress, giving birth to evolution.–Albert Einstein