MATCHING OR MISMATCHING! WHICH IS MORE EFFECTIVE ON CHILDREN’S CREATIVITY?

The present paper aims to explore the effectiveness of a new way of stimulating children’s creative imagination. This is through presenting the same imaginative story to the children using two different modes of presentation, one is verbal and the other is visual. These two modes of presentation could be either matching or mismatching to the children’s styles of learning and thinking (L&T). In particular, I examine whether matching or mismatching the mode of presentation (verbal or visual) of a story with the children’s preferred styles of learning and thinking (L&T) has an impact on primary school children’s creativity (specifically their creative imagination). In other words, I examine whether matching the mode of presentation of an imaginative story- with the children’s cognitive styles (styles of learning and thinking L&T) is more effective on stimulating their creative imagination, or whether the mismatching is more effective.
In particular, the investigation in this study sought an answer to the following questions:
-Which is more effective on stimulating the children’s creative imagination, presenting the story to them in a mode that matches their style of L&T or presenting it in a mode that mismatches their style of L&T?
- Is one of the modes of presentation -of the story in this study- more effective on the children’s creative imagination than the other or both have the same impact?

The methodology adopted is a systematic comparison technique between two groups of Qatari primary school children (9-11 years old). In the first group, the visual mode of presentation was implemented and the students had to watch the story (with no sound). In the second group, the verbal mode was used, i.e. the students had to listen to the story (with no visual aid). Both groups had then to answer the same questionnaire and solve the main problem of the story. Then, their responses were examined and compared in order to explore the impact of matching or mismatching- between the two modes of presentation (visual and verbal) and the two L&T styles (right and left)- on three basic aspects of creativity (fluency, flexibility and originality).
The main finding was that there was an impact of mismatching the modes of presentation and the L&T styles on the children’s creativity aspects especially the originality, and from the questionnaire and qualitative analysis of the data it emerged that the visual mode was more effective in stimulating children’s creative imagination.