Currently, many multimodal materials, such as pictures, videos, and audio, are used in undergraduate creative writing classes. However, students still commonly feel a “lack of visual imagery” during the ideation process and difficulty in arousing emotions. Psychological research indicates that mental imagery is a crucial internal simulation mechanism supporting creative output. Nevertheless, higher education rarely sets “vividness of mental imagery” as an explicit teaching objective. Based on this, this study proposes a mental imagery-oriented teaching framework, “leaving space for imagination,” which systematically guides students to generate and refine multisensory mental imagery by controlling the cue modality and the level of explanatory explicitness. A single-group pre-test and post-test design was adopted with 100 undergraduates majoring in media- and film-related fields at a Chinese university. The core of the class was the “four-stage lesson structure”: introduction and goal-focusing, single-modality cueing, mental imagery generation and initial writing, and work sharing and imagery-focused refinement. The Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire and Plymouth Sensory Imagery Questionnaire were measured before and after the teaching unit. Pre–post changes were analysed using paired-samples t -tests, with paired-design effect sizes estimated using Cohen’s dz . Paired-samples t -tests indicated pre–post increases in VVIQ, t (99) = 18.45, p 0.001, ΔM = 11.48, 95% CI (10.25, 12.72), and PSIQ total, t (99) = 14.93, p 0.001, ΔM = 20.34, 95% CI (17.64, 23.04), with large paired-design effect sizes (Cohen’s d z). All seven PSIQ sensory subscales (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, bodily sensation, and emotional imagery) also increased from pre-test to post-test. Overall, the findings provide preliminary evidence that a low-specification, single-modality cueing approach can be integrated into regular undergraduate creative writing instruction and is associated with increased self-reported imagery vividness. Future work should incorporate comparison groups, product-quality assessment, and process measures to test transferability and longer-term effects on creative outputs.
Yao et al. (Mon,) studied this question.