No abstract

History is replete with cases in which people have failed to recognize creative ideas generated by others. In various settings, people are responsible for evaluating ideas generated by others while not being involved in the idea generation process, and thus not exposed to the task. However, little is known on how this lack of task exposure affects creative forecasting. This study therefore examines the effect of task exposure on creative idea evaluation using 1864 German students who evaluated ideas on their creativity, originality and feasibility. Their ratings were compared to ratings by content and creativity experts. The students were randomly assigned to 1 of the following conditions: task exposure (i.e., they had to generate and evaluate ideas for the same task) or no task exposure (i.e., they had to generate ideas for a different task than the idea evaluation task). The results show that task exposure improves students' ability to accurately recognize creative and original ideas, and their ability to discriminate between highly feasible and unfeasible ideas. As such, these findings suggest that task exposure is beneficial to creative idea forecasting. Together, the results highlight the importance of carefully reconsidering whether people should be exposed to a task before evaluating others' ideas.

Most existing studies on excellence programmes focus primarily on the characteristics of students and/or programmes. However, little is known about the effects of participation in excellence programmes on cognitive and non-cognitive outcome measures. This study uses longitudinal data on over 1,000 students from five higher education institutions in the Netherlands to examine the added value of the excellence programmes relative to the regular education programmes. This study contributes to the current literature on the effects of participation in excellence programmes in three ways: the use of a representative control group; investigating multiple cognitive and non-cognitive outcome measures; and longitudinal assessments over a period of two years with pre-and post-test measurements (i.e. at the start and the end of the excellence programme). Our findings suggest that students who participated in excellence programmes have developed positively on both cognitive and non-cognitive skills, but that their development was not substantially different compared to students who did not participate in excellence programmes. The results underline that the students who participated in excellence programmes already performed better on most cognitive and non-cognitive skill measures at the start of the programme compared to students who did not participate in excellence programmes.

Many popular pedagogical approaches instruct children to construct their ideas into tangible and physical products. With the prospect of implementation, do children decide to go for the most creative ideas or do they shift towards ideas that are perhaps less creative but easier to construct? We conducted a field experiment to test whether expected construction affects children’s creative idea selection. In this experiment, 403 children were asked to select the most original ideas to make a toy elephant more fun to play with. We randomly assigned them to a treatment condition—in which they were informed they had to construct one of the original ideas that they selected—and a control group—in which children were informed that, after idea selection, they had to perform another task. Children who were instructed to construct the selected idea into a tangible product turned a blind eye to original ideas and preferred the more feasible ideas. Thus, pedagogical approaches that aim to stimulate creativity by instructing children to construct original ideas into tangible and physical products may unintentionally change children’s choices for creative ideas. This finding highlights the importance for educators of guiding children’s decision-making process in creative problem solving, and to be aware of children’s bias against original ideas when designing creative assignments for them.