Collaborative Creativity Of Middle School Students Under Different Task Characteristics

Innovation defines the highest of one’s self-value, as well unexhausted motivation for an nation. Creativity, on the other hand, means originality and acceptable by certain field; it is the scientific weapon that promotes industries. Ever since creativity got attention from researchers, the paradigm of creativity has undergone three stages: genius creativity, individual creativity and group creativity.Where after, Along with the prompting creative products made through collaboration,and countries’ emphasize on cultivating creative person and institution, a newly developed field finally comes to the world: collaborative creativity.During the youth, people’s views on life and value are gradually set,and intelligence structure is mature. This makes it crucial time to cultivate middle school students the awareness and ability of collaborative creativity. However,creativity-cultivating is never easy in China’s secondary education, let alone collaborative creativity. This dissertation explores the mode how task characteristics and individual variables work in collaborative creativity, and aims at bringing out new assessing ways, figuring out key elements in designing the tasks for collaborative creativity, so as to dig the unearthed potential of each student. Additionally, this dissertation extends the theory of introverted/extroverted thinking styles and gender-discipline identity integration from individual creativity to collaborative creativity, surely meaning something theoretically.In details, this dissertation, including 3 experiments, responds to the current education reform and adopts Chinese as the knowledge field. In experiment 1, a 2*2 random block design was adopted to check the relationship between thinking styles and collaborative creativity. According to the results, no significant differentiation was identified in the output of collaborative creativity between those with introverted thinking style and those with extroverted thinking style,while the opposite results were found in each individual’s creativity performance in collaboration. Secondly,the tasks differed in preference caused clear differences in the output of collaborative creativity and each individual’s creativity performance. Lastly, the interaction effect between thinking style and preference was only detected significant in individuals’creativity performance in collaborative creativity.Based on experiment 1,I selected the task that students prefer as original task,and adapted it into two tasks with or without gender clues. Also, in experiment 2, a 2*2 random block design was used to check the relationship between gender-discipline identity integration and collaborative creativity. It turns out that no significant differentiation was identified in the output of collaborative creativity between those with higher identity integration and those with lower ones, while the opposite in each individual’s creativity performance in collaboration. Secondly,the task with gender clue or not causes clear differences in the output of collaborative creativity and each individual’s creativity performance. Besides, their interaction effect is rather significant in the process and output of collaborative creativity as well.So, in experiment 3, I checked the relationship between introverted/extroverted thinking styles and gender-discipline identity integration in individual’s creativity performance in collaboration under the task with both gender clue and higher preference. It reveals that both individual variables does not impact on collaborative creativity separately, whereas, their interaction does.