Two decades of research on children's creativity development during primary education in relation to task characteristics

This systematic literature review aimed to gain more insight into research on the development of children's creativity in primary education in relation to different task characteristics. The review introduces a taxonomy to map creativity tasks. The taxonomy is based on a broad conceptualization of creativity, and differentiates between open- and close-ended, and integrating and fragmenting creativity tasks. Besides using the taxonomy, we also analyzed tasks in terms of the used domains of the stimulus and response of the tasks. A total of 52 studies published in the last 20 years were systematically analyzed with a combination of descriptive analyses and meta-analyses. The body of research demonstrated a varied picture concerning the measurement of creativity and its subdimensions. Open-ended integrating and open-ended fragmenting tasks were frequently used. The results showed a general increase in creativity across primary education. Less pronounced developmental patterns were found for the originality subdimension (open-ended fragmenting taxonomy quadrant), and for general creativity and some subdimensions when tasks with a combination of figural and verbal responses were used. The taxonomy of creativity tasks, introduced in this review, can be useful for both clarifying discussions in the creativity research discourse and designing creativity activities for educational practice

A developmental psychology perspective on preschool science learning: Children's exploratory play, naïve theories, and causal learning

In wetenschaps- en technologieonderwijs voor jonge kinderen staat het onderzoekend spel centraal. Voor- en vroegschoolse educatieprogramma's benadrukken het belang van het leren van onderzoeksvaardigheden, en musea voor wetenschap en techniek beschouwen onderzoekend gedrag als onmisbaar tijdens tentoonstellingsbezoek. Tessa van Schijndel onderzocht het spelenderwijs leren van jonge kinderen, zowel in gecontroleerde en natuurlijke omgevingen, en werkte met science center NEMO aan het toepassen van de onderzoeksresultaten in de onderwijspraktijk. Ze bekeek onder meer het effect van begeleiding van volwassenen op het onderzoekend spel van kinderen in kinderdagverblijven en NEMO. Om het spel van peuters en kleuters in deze natuurlijke omgevingen te meten ontwikkelde ze de Exploratory Behavior Scale. Daarnaast onderzocht Van Schijndel de interactie tussen het onderzoekend spel van jonge kinderen en hun domeinspecifieke kennis. Ze bestudeerde de kennisontwikkeling van kinderen in verschillende domeinen in de biologie en natuurkunde. Zo keek ze naar de theorieën die kinderen hebben over schaduwgrootte en over prenatale ontwikkeling. Uit haar resultaten blijkt dat de voorkennis van kleuters hun spel beïnvloedt: kinderen die bewijs zagen dat conflicteerde met hun theorie lieten een ander spelpatroon zien dan kinderen die niet-conflicterend bewijs zagen. Ten slotte onderzocht Van Schijndel onder welke omstandigheden kinderen leren van hun spel. Ze toonde specifieke verbanden aan tussen de voorkennis en het leren van kleuters, en het patroon van onderzoekend spel en het leren van kleuters

Stimulus set size and statistical coverage of the grammar in artificial grammar learning

Adults and children acquire knowledge of the structure of their environment on the basis of repeated exposure to samples of structured stimuli. In the study of inductive learning, a straightforward issue is how much sample information is needed to learn the structure. The present study distinguishes between two measures for the amount of information in the sample: set size and the extent to which the set of exemplars statistically covers the underlying structure. In an artificial grammar learning experiment, learning was affected by the sample's statistical coverage of the grammar, but not by its mere size. Our result suggests an alternative explanation of the set size effects on learning found in previous studies (McAndrews & Moscovitch, 1985; Meulemans & Van der Linden, 1997), because, as we argue, set size was confounded with statistical coverage in these studies

Do individual differences in children’s curiosity relate to their inquiry-based learning?

This study investigates how individual differences in 7- to 9-year-olds' curiosity relate to the inquiry-learning process and outcomes in environments differing in structure. The focus on curiosity as individual differences variable was motivated by the importance of curiosity in science education, and uncertainty being central to both the definition of curiosity and the inquiry-learning environment. Curiosity was assessed with the Underwater Exploration game (Jirout, J., & Klahr, D. (2012). Children's scientific curiosity: In search of an operational definition of an elusive concept. Developmental Review, 32, 125–160. doi:10.1016/j.dr.2012.04.002), and inquiry-based learning with the newly developed Scientific Discovery task, which focuses on the principle of designing informative experiments. Structure of the inquiry-learning environment was manipulated by explaining this principle or not. As intelligence relates to learning and possibly curiosity, it was taken into account. Results showed that children's curiosity was positively related to their knowledge acquisition, but not to their quality of exploration. For low intelligent children, environment structure positively affected their quality of exploration, but not their knowledge acquisition. There was no interaction between curiosity and environment structure. These results support the existence of two distinct inquiry-based learning processes – the designing of experiments, on the one hand, and the reflection on performed experiments, on the other – and link children's curiosity to the latter process