Enhancing Creative Thinking in Primary School Students Through a Structured Experiential Practice Course: A Quasi-Experimental Test of the OPEN Teaching Model

This study introduces and evaluates OPEN, a structured teaching model that translates thinking-based instruction into a coherent sequence for creativity-oriented experiential learning. By integrating Origin, Plan, Explore, and Narrate, the model connects problem identification and collaborative planning with evidence-based inquiry, revision, and communication—processes often addressed separately in primary-school practice. We examined OPEN in a 12-week class-level quasi-experimental study involving 400 students in Grades 3–4 across 10 intact classes in one primary school. Five classes received the OPEN course, while five received a regular practice course with comparable instructional time and thematic resources. Standardized and curriculum-based measures assessed creative thinking and related practical performance before and after the intervention. To reflect the nested classroom design, class-level change scores and small-sample-corrected cluster-robust estimates served as the principal basis for inference, with student-level mixed ANOVAs providing complementary analyses. Student-level analyses indicated gains in selected creative-thinking and performance indicators. Cluster-aware estimates for the four theory-prioritized outcomes were positive, although imprecise. The study offers an ecologically grounded test of how a clearly specified instructional model can be embedded in routine primary-school practice. OPEN provides a replicable framework for aligning creative-thinking goals, teacher scaffolding, inquiry, and student products, and offers a foundation for more rigorous multi-school evaluation of creativity-focused teaching.