The current study aimed to investigate whether age, gender, and testing environment may have an effect on children’s creativity in a real-life setting. Participants included 111 children aged from seven to eleven years. They were given one verbal (Guilford’s Alternative Uses Task) and one figural (Test for Creative Thinking–Drawing Production) creative thinking task either in their everyday classroom or in their school “art room.” On average, in the verbal task, girls tended to outperform boys in fluency and flexibility. Contrary to the 4th-grade slump found in previous studies, divergent thinking, on average, increased with age for verbal originality and verbal elaboration. These results suggest the potential importance of experience on verbal creativity tasks. In the verbal task, for the originality score, and in the drawing task, participants in the art room displayed, on average, greater levels of creative thinking than those in the classroom. These findings suggest that the physical environment can affect differently children’s creative potential.

中文翻译：

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探索年龄、性别和学校环境对儿童创造性思维能力的影响

目前的研究旨在调查年龄、性别和测试环境是否会影响现实生活环境中儿童的创造力。参与者包括 111 名 7 至 11 岁的儿童。他们在日常课堂或学校的“艺术室”中接受了一项口头（吉尔福德的替代用途任务）和一项图形（创造性思维测试——绘画作品）创造性思维任务。平均而言，在语言任务中，女孩在流畅性和灵活性方面的表现往往优于男孩。与之前研究中发现的 4 年级低迷相反，平均而言，发散思维随着年龄的增长而增加，以达到口头独创性和口头阐述的程度。这些结果表明经验对口头创造力任务的潜在重要性。在口头任务中，对于原创性分数，以及在绘画任务中，平均而言，艺术室的参与者比课堂上的参与者表现出更高水平的创造性思维。这些发现表明，物理环境可以不同程度地影响儿童的创造潜力。