The creative element in secondary school children’s writing

Abstract

In Part One, the nature and development of the type of expressive English writing found in many junior and some secondary schools, frequently called 'creative writing', is examined. Views and definitions of creative writing, the psychological foundations behind child-centred school activities, and ways of helping the development of creative writing, are discussed within the context of personal growth rather than mere development of a skill. Current psychological opinion and experiment on the nature of creative behaviour in relation to general intellectual ability is considered, and there are reviews of anecdotal as well as more scientific approaches to problems of developing and marking English writing. Two investigations are reported in Part Two. The first is into the development of creative writing ability. Writing was sampled from the 1965 intake of five secondary schools at the beginning, middle and end of the children's first two years. The work of random samples of 10 children from each school was assessed by a team of five judges to form a multiple impression mark for each of the 50 children. A statistically significant improvement over the first-two individual years, and a highly significant improvement over the first two years was found. However, differences in the quality of writing between 4 of the 5 school samples were found to be statistically insignificant after analyses of co-variance over any of the three periods. The girls' grammar sample had a significant superiority in a first year and the two-year period analyses over both the other grammar samples and the two secondary modern samples. Quantitative developments are also investigated. The second investigation examines the effect of varied and strong sensory stimulation, and the absence of it, on the writing of three groups, each consisting of 24 11+ secondary modern boys who were taught in. different ways, samples of writing being drawn at the beginning and end of a 12-week period. A statistically significant difference was found between Groups III and II: the experimental Group III achieving the best results, and the sensorily ‘deprived' but more intelligent Group I doing better than the third Group II, which had been less adequately stimulated than Group III, Recommendations for further research are made.