Does a gifted-child enrichment day boost intelligence and creativity?
Gifted children in a weekly enrichment program improved on a standard reasoning test over the school year, but their creativity and open-ended reasoning did not change.
Source
Problem Space Matters: Evaluation of a German Enrichment Program for Gifted Children
Study at a glance
- Design
- Other — Quasi-experimental pre-post evaluation over one school year: children in a weekly enrichment program versus individually matched classmates from the same school (matched on gender, grade and baseline test scores); no random assignment
- N
- N=48 · 48 children analysed: 24 in the enrichment (intervention) group and 24 matched controls selected from 166 non-program children; 190 children were tested in total
- Population
- German primary-school children (grades 1-4, ages 6-10) at one school in Rhineland-Palatinate, with the intervention group identified as gifted
- Outcome
- Change from start to end of the school year on Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices (well-defined problem space), the Creative Reasoning Task relations score (ill-defined problem space, same matrix domain) and the Test for Creative Thinking-Drawing Production
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What they did
The researchers evaluated a German state program in which children identified as gifted leave their normal class one day a week for project work, a foreign language, puzzles and science activities. At one host school they tested children at the start of the year and again 36 weeks later on three tasks: Raven's matrices (one correct answer), the Creative Reasoning Task (children invent their own matrix puzzle, an open-ended version of the same kind of problem) and a drawing-based creativity test. The 24 program children were compared with 24 classmates from the same school matched on gender, grade and first-session scores.
What they found
Only the program group improved on Raven's matrices across the year; by the second session they scored higher than the matched controls, who had been equal at baseline. Neither group changed on the open-ended matrix-invention task or on the creativity test, and there was no group difference on either. The authors interpret this as evidence that the program trained thinking in well-defined problems (one right answer) but not in ill-defined problems (many possible answers), even when the content domain was held constant.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Children were not randomly assigned: the program group was selected by parents, teachers and interviews, so differences in motivation or expectancy could explain the Raven's gain as well as the program itself. Each group had only 24 children from a single school, and most program children had high IQ but average or below-average creativity, so a ceiling or selection effect may limit what the creativity measures could show. The study cannot say which program ingredients mattered, and the authors' explanations for the null creativity result (selection bias, too little creative content, too little time) are speculation rather than tested findings.
Key terms
- Well-defined problem space
- A problem with a single correct solution reached by logical steps, as in a standard intelligence test item.
- Ill-defined problem space
- A problem with many possible solutions that can be better or worse, such as inventing your own puzzle or making a drawing.
- Enrichment program
- Extra educational activities that go wider and deeper than the normal curriculum, as opposed to acceleration, which moves a child through the curriculum faster.
- Matched control group
- A comparison group chosen so that each member resembles a member of the intervention group on key characteristics such as age, gender and baseline scores.
- Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM)
- Raven's non-verbal reasoning test in which people choose the missing piece that completes a pattern matrix.
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Quiz yourself
Which test measured reasoning in a well-defined problem space in this study?
Common questions
Why use a matrix-invention task as well as Raven's matrices?
Both use the same material (patterns in small matrices), so comparing them isolates the type of problem (one right answer versus open-ended) rather than the content, which is what lets the authors argue that problem space, not domain, explains the different results.
Does this show that enrichment programs cannot foster creativity?
No. It shows that this particular program, as run at one school, did not change creativity scores within a year; a program with more open-ended tasks, or a different selection process, might.
Could the Raven's improvement be a practice effect?
Both groups took the same test twice, so simple practice should have helped the controls equally; the fact that only the program group improved makes pure practice unlikely, though expectancy or selection differences remain possible.
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