Enhancing creativity: A comparison between effects of an indicative instruction “to be creative” and a more elaborate heuristic instruction on Chinese student creativity.

This study consisted of an experiment conducted with a sample of 180 Chinese high school students,designed to scrutinize the effects of prompting and instructing students to be creative in their creativeperformance in the domains of art and literature. The results of the study reveal that students’ creativitybenefited from receiving appropriate strategies or more elaborate instruction (as induced by instructing),but not by merely being motivated (as induced by prompting) to be creative, regardless of the taskdomain. Gender differences in creativity were found only in the domain of literature, in favor of femaleparticipants. Implications of the findings are discussed.