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Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been shown to enhance divergent and convergent creative thinking. Yet, how stimulation impacts creative performance over time, and what cognitive mechanisms underlie any such enhancement, remain largely unanswered questions. In the present research, we aimed to (1) verify the impact of DLPFC tDCS on both convergent and divergent thinking, and further investigated (2) the temporal dynamics of divergent thinking, focusing on the serial order effect (i.e., the tendency for ideas to become more original and less frequent over time), and (3) any role that cognitive inhibition may play in mediating any effect of stimulation on creative thinking (considering the DLPFC's involvement in driving inhibitory processes that are also relevant for creative thinking). In a within-subjects design, twenty-six participants received three types of cross-hemispheric tDCS stimulation over the DLPFC (left cathodal and right anodal, L-R+; left anodal and right cathodal, L+R-; and sham). Before stimulation, they completed a pre-flanker task measuring cognitive inhibition; during stimulation, they completed the Alternate Uses Task (AUT), Remote Associates Test (RAT), and post-flanker task. Results showed that, compared with the sham stimulation, originality of responses in the AUT was significantly enhanced in the L+R- condition, while no tDCS effect was observed for the RAT. Additionally, compared with the other stimulation conditions, we found a diminished serial order effect in the L+R- condition characterized by an accelerated production of more original ideas. Critically, the L+R- condition was accompanied by better performance on the flanker task. Our findings thus verify that L+R- tDCS over the DLPFC accelerates idea originality also providing tentative clues that inhibition may act as a cognitive mechanism underlying enhancements in divergent thinking resulting from frontal lobe neuromodulation.

Although there are numerous chemistry-related careers within the STEM fields, chemistry-related careers are not well regarded. High school is a critical time for developing students' career choices. Previous studies suggest that anxiety and identity may be predictors of career choice. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of high school students' chemistry anxiety (learning anxiety and test anxiety) and chemistry identity (competence/performance beliefs, interest, external recognition, and holistic impression on identity) on chemistry career choices. Guided by the possibility of different hindrances to chemistry career choice for males and females, the study further detected gender-specific patterns of relations between variables. The results of multigroup structural equation modeling firstly showed that different constructs of chemistry identity were positive and significant predictors of chemistry career choice but varied by gender. Specifically, competence/ performance beliefs and holistic impression on identity were significantly associated with females' chemistry career choices. In contrast, interest, external recognition, and holistic impression on identity motivated males' chemistry career choices. Secondly, the effects of chemistry learning anxiety and test anxiety on chemistry career choice were completely mediated by chemistry identity, whereas the pathways and strength of mediation differed between females and males.

Though previous research has established a strong link between resilience and cognitive creativity, few studies have extended this association to social creativity. The underlying mechanisms of the influence of resilience on social creativity remain unknown. Therefore, the current study introduced sense of humor and positive mood to explore the influence of resilience on social creativity. We established a chain mediation model with data from 186 Chinese college students. The results showed that resilience was associated with social creativity. The sense of humor and positive mood were serial mediators in this relationship. The results have demonstrated that student participants with higher levels of resilience are more likely to use humor in their study, which may help them get a more positive mood than their counterparts with lower levels of resilience. Then, positive mood is conducive to students' performance of social creativity.

Background: Since the outbreak of COVID-19, online courses have been extensively used from K-12 to higher education. Online learning engagement, an important factor in online learning success, is currently at a low level in high school. Meanwhile, the research on the factors that influence high school students' online learning engagement is still limited. Objectives: Based on the theories of regulatory focus and value control, this study developed a multi-mediation model to investigate whether self-efficacy and academic emotions can mediate the relationship between regulatory focus and online learning engagement. Methods: A total of 926 high school student (52.16% female, mean age = 16.47 years) were recruited to participate in this study and completed self-report measures of regulatory focus, online learning engagement, online learning self-efficacy and academic emotions. And we used SPSS macro PROCESS developed by Hayes to examine the mediating role of online learning self-efficacy and academic emotions. Results and Conclusions: The results indicated that promotion focus had a stable positive effect on online learning engagement of high school students, whereas prevention focus had a significant negative effect on the same. Self-efficacy and positive emotions had a significant positive mediating effect between promotion focus and online learning engagement. Moreover, positive emotions had a significant positive mediating effect between the prevention focus and online learning engagement, while negative emotions had a significant negative mediating effect between them.

Previous studies have illustrated a robust relationship between academic self-efficacy and academic performance. However, the underlying psychological mechanism of this relationship is still unclear. This study employed a moderated mediation model to examine whether academic buoyancy (ability to deal with academic challenges and setbacks in school daily life) mediated the relationship between academic self-efficacy and academic performance and whether social support moderated the mediation process. A total of 860 (M = 16.39, SD = 0.73) high school students in China completed questionnaires on academic self-efficacy, academic buoyancy, and social support. Academic performance was measured by standardized tests. The results indicated that academic buoyancy partially mediated the association between academic self-efficacy and academic performance. Social support moderated the first half of the path of the mediation model. The findings of the present study provide educational guidelines and suggestions for improving academic performance among high school students.

With the urgent goal of increasing student retention within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, STEM identity is highlighted as a powerful source of student persistence. Since chemistry is an important part of the STEM discipline, a growing body of research has focused on chemistry identity. However, we currently know very little about how to improve students' chemistry identity. Therefore, the present study aimed to explore the mechanisms of metacognition, learning burnout, and learning flow in identity in the context of chemistry, further providing suggestions for the advancement of students' chemistry identity. Based on previous studies, the current study hypothesized that chemistry learning burnout and flow would play a chain mediating role in the relationship between metacognition and chemistry identity. A sample of 594 tenth-grade students completed questionnaires for the assessment of the four main variables in this study. The results showed that (1) metacognition, chemistry learning burnout, and chemistry learning flow significantly predicted students' chemistry identity after the effect of gender was controlled; (2) both chemistry learning burnout and chemistry learning flow played separate mediating roles in the relationship between metacognition and chemistry identity; and (3) the chain mediating effect of metacognition [right arrow] chemistry learning burnout [right arrow] chemistry learning flow [right arrow] chemistry identity was significant. These findings imply that embedded metacognitive prompts, decreased learning burnout, and increased flow experience are vastly helpful in developing learners' chemistry identity. Finally, we further highlight the educational implications of the findings of this study and propose lines of future research.

An emerging body of research has focused on students' creativity in group contexts, with the assumption that students could be inspired by peers' ideas. Although students' openness and attention to peers' ideas are claimed to play important roles in their creativity in group settings, there is little empirical research that tests this assumption. This study examined the moderating effect of attention to peers' ideas in the relation between openness and creativity in electronic brainstorming. Participants were 91 undergraduate students who took about 10 min to complete a creative idea generation task during electronic brainstorming. Regression analyses found that students who were characterized by high openness were more creative, but only when they showed more attention to peers' ideas. This suggests that electronic brainstorming can be useful for enhancing the creativity of some students.

This study tested the interaction effect of the instructor's eye gaze (direct gaze vs. averted gaze) and facial expression (happy face vs. neutral face) on students' attention and learning performance in slide-based video lectures. University students (N = 120) participated in the experiment in a laboratory setting. The results of ANOVAs showed that students in the conditions that included the instructor's direct gaze paid greater attention to the instructor's face and paid less attention to the video lecture slides. However, direct gaze predicted better learning when the instructor had a happy facial expression. Our results suggest that the effects of an instructor's eye gaze are modulated by her facial expression in this educational context. The findings have practical implications for designing slide-based video lectures: an instructor is encouraged to look straight towards the camera with a happy expression.

Background: Science identity is widely regarded as a key predictor of students' persistence in STEM fields, while the brain drain in STEM fields is an urgent issue for countries to address. Based on previous studies, it is logical to suggest that epistemological beliefs about science and reflective thinking contribute to the development of science identity. However, few empirical studies have focused on the relationship between these three variables. Therefore, using structural equation modeling, the present study constructed a model to explore the relationship between epistemological beliefs, reflective thinking, three science identity shaping constructs (interest, competence/performance beliefs, external recognition), and the holistic impression on science identity (a single indicator). Results: The results indicated that the epistemological beliefs were positively correlated with interest and reflective thinking, as well as the direct effects of reflective thinking on interest or competence/performance beliefs were significant. In terms of indirect effect, interest plays a mediating role in the relationship between epistemological beliefs and holistic impression on science identity, while the mediation effect of competence/performance beliefs was not significant. Epistemological beliefs contributed to the holistic impression on science identity via reflective thinking, competence/performance beliefs, and interest or external recognition. Conclusion: The results of this study reveal that epistemological beliefs and reflective thinking have a direct effect on science identity. In addition, epistemological beliefs have an indirect effect on scientific identity through reflective thinking. These provide insights for educators to figure out how to develop students' science identity by enhancing their epistemological beliefs and reflective thinking. Practical educational implications are also further discussed in the present study.

Based on social cognitive theory and ecological systems theory, this study constructed a conditional process model to explore the relationship between academic self-efficacy and test anxiety as well as underlying psychological mechanisms through academic buoyancy and peer support. A sample of Chinese high school students (N = 560) completed questionnaires assessing academic self-efficacy, academic buoyancy, peer support, and test anxiety. Structural equation modeling (SEM) revealed an indirect effect of academic self-efficacy on test anxiety through academic buoyancy. Moreover, the results of the conditional process analysis demonstrated that this indirect effect was moderated by peer support. The findings suggested that both personal positive psychological characteristics (e.g., academic buoyancy) and school environmental factors (e.g., peer support) are protective factors for test anxiety in high school students. Limitations and implications for future research are discussed.

Background: While empirical research on creativity has grown steadily over the past 35 years, teachers' beliefs about creativity and their implicit beliefs about teaching for creativity remains understudied, as well as cross-cultural examination of teacher beliefs in this area. Aims: This study explored the measurement invariance of beliefs about "teaching" for creativity (creative self-efficacy, fixed creative mindset, growth creative mindset, desirability of creativity for teaching success and value of creativity for student academic and workplace success). Sample: American and Chinese educators at two universities were surveyed to rate the degree to which they agreed with statements about beliefs about teaching for creativity (N = 376). Methods: Measurement invariance analysis was used Multiple-Groups Confirmatory Factor Analysis with the "lavaan" package in the R Statistical Programing Environment. Results: Partial measurement invariance was obtained such that a model with factor loadings constrained equal across samples for four of the five constructs (creative self-efficacy, fixed creative mindset, growth creative mindset, desirability of creativity for teaching success), did not worsen model fitness. Additionally, when factor loadings for items on the value of creativity for student academic and workplace success latent variable were allowed to vary across samples, we found evidence of structural invariance. That is, the covariances among the five latent variables were found to be invariant across samples. Conclusions: The major result of this study is that the theoretical structure and relations among five important creative self-constructs is invariant across American and Chinese educational constructs. However, there may be cultural differences in the value of creativity for student academic and workplace success, as perceived by teachers. Future research can focus on calibrating teacher beliefs about teaching for creativity with classroom observation, in American and Chinese educational contexts.

Intrinsic motivation is seen as the principal source of vitality in educational settings. This study examined whether intrinsic motivation promoted online group creativity and tested a cognitive mechanism that might explain this effect. University students (N = 72; 61 women) who volunteered to participate were asked to fulfill a creative task with a peer using online software. The peer was actually a fake participant who was programed to send prepared answers in sequence. Ratings of creativity (fluency, flexibility and originality) and eye movement data (focus on own vs. peer's ideas on the screen) were used to compare students who were induced to have high intrinsic motivation and those induced to have low intrinsic motivation. Results showed that compared to participants with low intrinsic motivation, those with high intrinsic motivation showed higher fluency and flexibility on the creative task and spent a larger percentage of time looking at their own ideas on the screen. The two groups did not differ in how much they looked at the peer's ideas. In addition, students' percentage dwell time on their own ideas mediated the beneficial effect of intrinsic motivation on idea fluency. These results suggest that although intrinsic motivation could enhance the fluency of creative ideas in an online group, it does not necessarily promote interaction among group members. Given the importance of interaction in online group setting, findings of this study suggest that in addition to enhancing intrinsic motivation, other measures should be taken to promote the interaction behavior in online groups.

Two studies investigated the effects of cognitive and school environmental factors on adolescents' creative performance. The first study tested the effects of expected evaluation and cognitive style on creativity among 89 high school students. The second study tested the effects of evaluation type and cognitive style on creativity among 92 high school students. Study 1 found main effects of expected evaluation and cognitive style on creativity. The interaction between expected evaluation and cognitive style was statistically significant. Under an experimental condition of expected evaluation, field-dependent adolescents performed more creatively (i.e., higher originality) than those without expected evaluation. Study 2 uncovered main effects of expected evaluation type and cognitive style on creativity but no interactions between expected evaluation type and cognitive style. Adolescents performed better on the dimension of flexibility in a controlling evaluation condition, compared with adolescents in informational evaluation condition, and field-independent adolescents showed more fluency and originality than field-dependent adolescents. Together, this research provides a better understanding of the effects of expected evaluation and cognitive style on adolescents' creative performance. Implications for further research are discussed.

Although encouraging student creativity is a commonly recognised goal of STEM education, there is a lack of research in this area. In this study, the effects of epistemic beliefs on STEM creativity and the mediation of intellectual risk-taking were investigated. The subjects were 461 primary students in Hong Kong. The findings revealed that (i) intellectual risk-taking was a significant and positive predictor of STEM creativity; (ii) the certainty and justification dimensions of epistemic beliefs had direct, negative and significant impacts on STEM creativity; and (iii) the complexity dimension of epistemic beliefs had both direct and indirect significantly positive impacts on STEM creativity, and the indirect impacts were mediated by intellectual risk-taking. This study revealed the complicated relationships between different orientations in epistemic beliefs and STEM creativity, which include both constraining and facilitating effects, and both direct and indirect impacts. We argue that although reducing naïve and relativistic epistemic beliefs is essential for the development of creativity in STEM education, the effects of cultivating mature epistemic beliefs may not be sufficient. Further direct and explicit approaches are required to more effectively enhance students' STEM creativity.

The present study aimed to explore the neural-related mechanism of the creative evaluation process in individual with different levels of creativity. The time course of evaluation process for creative objects was monitored by event-related potentials (EPRs). Forty-five participants were divided into the high-creativity performance (HCP) group and the low-creativity performance (LCP) group and then completed a creative object evaluation task. The behavioral results revealed that the HCP group showed higher accuracy rates on the creative object evaluation task than the LCP group did. The ERPs analysis demonstrated that in the early stage of creative object processing, ordinary objects elicited a more negative anterior N2 at 190-340 ms than the creative objects did in the LCP group. In the late stage of creative object processing, creative objects elicited a more positive ERPs deflection in the HCP group than in the LCP group at 350-500 ms and at 500-1000 ms. Taken together, these results indicate that different creativity performance individuals may express different attention patterns or top-down processing strategy in the early stage of creative object evaluation processing; and high-creativity performance individuals can better utilize both cognitive and non-cognitive evaluation processing in the late stage, to process the creative object effectively.

Metaphors are a common way to express creative language, yet the cognitive basis of figurative language production remains poorly understood. Previous studies found that higher creative individuals can better comprehend novel metaphors, potentially due to a more flexible semantic memory network structure conducive to remote conceptual combination. The present study extends this domain to creative metaphor production and examined whether the ability to produce creative metaphors is related to variation in the structure of semantic memory. Participants completed a creative metaphor production task and two verbal fluency tasks. They were divided into two equal groups based on their creative metaphor production score. The semantic networks of these two groups were estimated and analyzed based on their verbal fluency responses using a computational network science approach. Results revealed that the semantic networks of high-metaphor producing individuals were more flexible, clustered, and less rigid than that of the low-metaphor producing individuals. Importantly, these results replicated across both semantic categories. The findings provide the first evidence that a flexible, clustered, and less rigid semantic memory structure relates to people's ability to produce figurative language, extending the growing literature on the role of semantic networks in creativity to the domain of metaphor production.

Dynamic, momentary affective states have significant effects on creativity; however, how negative affect modulates the neurocognitive processes involved in creativity is still unclear. This study investigated the neural mechanisms of creative thinking under varying avoidance-motivation intensity. Sixty participants (17 men and 43 women; age range = 18-25 years; mean = 21.22 years, SD = 1.35) randomly assigned to three groups (high-avoidance-motivation, low-avoidance-motivation, and unmotivated bias state) completed creative tasks in two conditions -- creative idea generation and creative idea evaluation. In the former condition, the low-avoidance-motivation group exhibited greater fluency of divergent thinking than the high-avoidance-motivation group. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy revealed an interaction effect between creative demand and avoidance-motivation intensity in the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus and right middle frontal gyrus in creative idea generation. In the latter condition, there were no significant differences between the three avoidance motivation groups in behavior and brain activation results. Furthermore, the association of the prefrontal cortex and temporal region in these tasks indicated that these regions may be part of the core mechanism underlying the modulatory effects of avoidance-motivation intensity on ongoing neurocognitive processing during creative thinking.

This paper presents the Learn to Think preschool (LTT-P) program for promoting creativity in preschoolers and reviews its potential benefits. LTT-P was designed within the framework of the successful LTT creativity program for older students and both were developed to fit the Chinese education system. To assess the potential benefits of LTT-P, a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group study was conducted in a preschool in an urban region in the northwest of China, involving 68 middle level and 87 senior level children. The Lines and Circles subtests of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking were used to examine the development of children's creativity on the dimensions fluency, originality, and elaboration between pretest and posttest. The results suggest that the LTT-P program has the potential to promote young children's creative thinking, especially with regard to the aspects of originality and elaboration. The results for fluency are less clear. To the best of our knowledge, LTT-P is the first program, grounded in a structured learning theory and sound curriculum framework, to support children's creativity development in Chinese early childhood education.

Based on the "analytical framework of nature of science" (NOS) in junior school science textbooks, a content analysis method was adopted to analyze the NOS in junior middle school physical textbooks (grade 8) of five editions authorized by the Ministry of Education of China, and the features of NOS were analyzed and compared. It was found that all five textbooks presented poor representations of NOS. None of these five editions were scientifically objective, nor did they include discussions of scientific laws and theories. Furthermore, they rarely presented empirical evidence to support their arguments. The explicit representations of NOS were particularly inadequate.

There has been growing interest in the possibility that peers' ideas can stimulate students' creativity in group contexts. However, empirical research on this issue is limited. This study tested the hypothesis that peers' ideas and students' openness to experience would predict student creativity and attention to peers' ideas. Undergraduate students (n = 60) completed creative tasks in an online collaborative group in which the ideas of "peers" were pre-programmed. Mixed ANOVAs showed support for the hypothesis. Specifically, students with higher (but not lower) openness, when exposed to a high (but not low) rate of peers' original ideas, paid greater attention to those ideas and were more creative. The implication for education is that teachers should encourage students to share more of their original ideas and to pay more attention to peers' ideas in online collaborative groups.

Instructor behaviour is known to affect learning performance, but it is unclear which specific instructor behaviours can optimize learning. We used eye-tracking technology and questionnaires to test whether the instructor's gaze guidance affected learners' visual attention, social presence, and learning performance, using four video lectures: declarative knowledge with and without the instructor's gaze guidance and procedural knowledge with and without the instructor's gaze guidance. The results showed that the instructor's gaze guidance not only guided learners to allocate more visual attention to corresponding learning content but also increased learners' sense of social presence and learning. Furthermore, the link between the instructor's gaze guidance and better learning was especially strong for participants with a high sense of social connection with the instructor when they learned procedural knowledge. The findings lead to a strong recommendation for educational practitioners: Instructors should provide gaze guidance in video lectures for better learning performance.

Creative objects differ from ordinary objects in that they are created by human beings to contain novel, creative information. Previous research has demonstrated that ordinary object processing involves both a perceptual process for analyzing different features of the visual input and a higher-order process for evaluating the relevance of this visual information. However, it is unclear how and when these processes are influenced by the creative information of the object. This study utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the time course of creative object processing. Behavioral results revealed that participants spent more time processing creative objects than they did ordinary objects. Analysis of scalp ERPs further revealed that creative objects elicited a more negative ERP deflection between 190 and 340 ms (N190-340) with an anterior scalp distribution. Additionally, creative objects elicited more positive ERP deflection than did ordinary objects between 400 and 700 ms (P400-700) with a right centro-parietal scalp distribution and between 700 and 1000 ms (late positive component) with a right anterior-central scalp distribution. Such results suggest that the processing of creative objects is composed of two distinct stages. The early perceptual stage involves the detection of visual differences exhibited by the creative objects, while the late stage involves the right-lateralized processes of understanding and encoding the creative information.

This study examined the influence of different mood states on Creative Science Problem Finding (CSPF). CSPF was measured in terms of Fluency, Flexibility, and Originality. Imagery techniques were used to induce positive or negative mood states in participants, with results suggesting that positive mood led to a significant increase in CSPF performance compared with neutral mood, especially for the dimensions of fluency and flexibility. No difference was found between negative mood and neutral mood. Results provide evidence that anger had no impact on CSPF performance compared with neutral mood. However, fear appeared to inhibit the performance of CSPF. The interaction between specific moods and CSPF provide evidence that moods influenced CSPF with open instructions more than with closed instructions.

Learning motivation has a significant effect on student learning, which is a key determinant of academic performance and creativity. It is increasingly popular and important to cultivate learning motivation in schools. To consider this trend, a long-term intervention program named "Learn to Think" (LTT) was designed not only to improve students' thinking ability but also to improve their learning motivation. The present study explored the effects of the LTT curriculum on primary school students' learning motivation. The sample consisted of 158 Chinese primary school students, who were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. Experimental students participated in the LTT curriculum for 4 years, with data collected via pretests, annual end-of-year assessments, and a delayed posttest administration 1 year after terminating the training. The results suggest that LTT had long-term transfer effects on the development of primary school students' learning motivation, especially on deep motivation.

The major objectives of this study were to determine the characteristics of creativity development of Chinese children, the creative organizational climate of Chinese schools, and the relations among them. The results provided evidence that the creativity scores of children in elementary school were significantly higher than those of children in middle school. The teachers' evaluation of the creative organizational climate of the elementary school was significantly higher than that of the middle school. When the two variables were analyzed together, both the creative organizational climate of schools and the creative thinking development of children decreased during the children's development. Moreover, the creativity and climate scores were highly correlated, and the results from a path analysis suggested that a school's creative organizational climate has a significant impact on all seven dimensions of creativity measured in this study. (Contains 2 tables, 4 figures and 2 footnotes.)

The "Learn to Think" (LTT) Intervention Program was developed for raising thinking abilities of primary and secondary school students. It has been implemented in more than 300 schools, and more than 200,000 students took part in the experiment over a 10"year span. Several longitudinal intervention studies showed that LTT could promote the development of students' thinking ability, learning motivation, and learning strategy as well as raise academic performance in primary schools. This article describes a study of the influence and the delayed effects of LTT on the scientific creativity of secondary school students. One hundred and seven students were selected from a secondary school, 54 of them participated in the LTT every 2 weeks and the rest had not. The intervention lasted 2 years, and the delayed effect was explored half a year after terminating the intervention. The Scientific Creativity Test for Secondary School Students was used four times from pre-test to delayed post-test. The results indicated that the LTT did promote the development of scientific creativity of secondary school students, and the effects on the scientific creativity were not necessarily immediate, but tended to be long-lasting. (Contains 7 tables and 7 figures.)

Creative problem-finding ability (CPFA) is an important component of creativity, but research into it has just started and results so far could not offer much guidance to teaching. This study utilized a 2 (teaching materials or tasks of different difficulty: high and low) × 3 (group member construction: homogeneous group, heterogeneous group, and voluntary group) between subjects design to examine how the group member construction affected student's peer interaction, and then affected creative problem-finding ability during a long-term classroom teaching process. Before the experiment, 217 5th-grade students (108 boys, 109 girls) in 4 classes were randomly chosen from 1 primary school in China to take the CPFA Test and then, according to the score on this, 188 students were chosen and matched into 6 equal groups. All of the participants in 6 groups received 16 classes of a thinking intervention program in 16 weeks and did the CPFA Test and Peer Interaction Ability Test after the experiment. The results showed that: (a) Teaching materials (or tasks) of different difficulty had no significant impact on improving students' creative problem-finding ability, (b) group member construction had a significant influence on students' peer interaction and CPFA, (c) Students of different initial CPFA in different groups had a significant difference on their peer interactive level and improvement of their CPFA, and (d) peer interaction had a positive correlation with students' CPFA.

Empirical research on the relationship between culture and creativity has thus far yielded no consistent results. Investigations of the differences are mostly post-hoc, and results are inconclusive. A creativity-value-oriented theory is proposed to explain cultural differences, as an alternative to ethnic and language effects. This study was conducted to compare the performances of artistic creativity of Germans and Chinese. Results revealed that the four groups of students examined (German students of Caucasian descent, German students of Asian descent, Chinese students studying abroad, and Chinese students studying in China) differed in their artistic creativity. German participants (Caucasian Germans and Asian Germans) produced more creative and aesthetically pleasing artwork than did their Chinese counterparts (Chinese studying abroad and domestic Chinese). This difference was observed by both German and Chinese judges. There no significant subgroup differences in creative performances--no difference between the two German groups, and no difference between the two Chinese groups. Finally, although there were significant differences between German judges, Chinese judges studying abroad, and domestic Chinese judges in judging the artworks, these were not due to a preference for artwork from students from their own cultural background. Chinese and German judges roughly agreed on what constitutes creativity. These results suggest that cultural differences affect creative performances.

Background: Methods for teaching thinking may be described as out-of-context or infusion. Both approaches have potential to raise students' general cognitive processing ability and so raise academic achievement, but each has disadvantages. Aims: To describe and evaluate a theory-based learn to think (LTT) curriculum for primary school students, which draws on the strengths of both out-of-context and infusion approaches. Sample: One-hundred and sixty-six students in three classes of Grade 1 (6+ years old), Grade 2 (7+ years old), and Grade 3 (8+ years old) in a primary school in Shanxi province, China, randomly ascribed to experimental (90) and control (76) groups. Methods: All students were pre-tested for non-verbal intelligence and academic achievement. Experimental students followed the LTT curriculum (one activity every 2 weeks) for 4 school years. All were post-tested on three occasions for thinking ability and four times for academic achievement. Results: Grade 1 and Grade 2 students showed effects of LTT from 1 year after their start and increasing: on thinking ability d = 0.78-1.45; on Chinese d = 0.68-1.07; on maths 0.58-0.87. Grade 3 students showed effects from 6 months after their start: on thinking ability 0.90-1.37; Chinese 0.77-1.32; maths 0.65-1.29. The effects were concentrated in students in the middle band of initial ability. Conclusions: A curriculum for teaching thinking based on a structured theoretical model that combines elements of out-of-context and infusion methods has been shown to have long-term far transfer effects on students' thinking ability and academic achievement. More work is needed to meet the needs of a wider range of abilities.

This study explores explicit and implicit gender-science stereotypes and affective attitudes towards science in a sample of Chinese secondary school students. The results showed that (1) gender-science stereotyping was more and more apparent as the specialization of science subjects progresses through secondary school, becoming stronger from the 10th grade; girls were more inclined to stereotype than boys while this gender difference decreased with increasing grade; (2) girls tend to have an implicit science-unpleasant/humanities-pleasant association from the 8th grade, while boys showed a negative implicit attitude towards science up to the 11th grade. In self-report, girls preferred humanities to science, while boys preferred science to humanities; (3) implicit affective attitude was closely related to implicit stereotype. In particular, implicit affective attitude has a stronger predictive power on stereotype than the other way around, the result of which may have more significance for girls. (Contains 6 tables and 3 figures.)

"Teenagers' abstract thinking ability test" was designed in accordance with the structure and performance of teenagers' ability to think abstractly. 138 Chinese junior high school students who learned New curriculum and old curriculum separately were measured. A comparison between the two kinds of students shows that abstract thinking ability of the former is notably higher than that of the latter. However, the performance of differences varies by school and gender.

Describes a study of the influence of the Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) program on the scientific creativity of secondary school students. Scientific creativity is measured by the Scientific Creativity Test for Secondary School Students. Results indicate that the program did promote the overall development of scientific creativity although the effects on different aspects of scientific creativity varied. (Author/SOE)

Describes the development of a test of scientific creativity for use with secondary school students which was constructed on the basis of an analysis of meaning and aspects of scientific creativity. Reports that the scientific creativity of secondary school students increases with age and science ability is a necessary but not sufficient condition for scientific creativity. (Contains 38 references.) (Author/YDS)