The Benefits of the Learn to Think Program for Preschoolers’ Creativity: An Explorative Study

Abstract

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.