Chinese students’ perceptions of their creativity and their perceptions of Western students’ creativity

Abstract

This paper applies the Four C Model of Creativity (‘Big-C, little-c, mini-c and Pro-c’) to determine Chinese students’ perceptions of their own creativity and their perceptions of Western students’ creativity. By surveying 100 Chinese students and interviewing 10 of them, this paper discovered that Chinese students generally perceived their creativity to be less than that of Western students. Differences on mini-c and Pro-c were larger in the direction of Western students being superior, and the items that differed in the opposite direction and those which did not differ were part of the subset of little-c items. The perceived superiority of Western students was not as strong in final-year students. Suggestions are proposed on how to nurture students’ creativity within context of culture.

Keywords:

• education
• psychology
• creativity
• cross-cultural
• perception