Utility of advertising for creativity education: an experimental study targeting school children

Abstract

This study investigated whether the Advertising-In-Education (hereafter AIE) program would influence the growth of creativity in elementary school students. AIE has been discussed by advertising scholars and used in some schools in South Korea since its inception approximately 10 years ago; yet, empirical research to prove its effect on education is rare. A field experiment using a pilot AIE program was implemented with third and fourth graders at two local elementary schools for 12 weeks. To measure the degree and significance of improvement in students' creative ability and creative personality, a series of pretests and posttests were administered using creativity measuring instruments. Results indicate that the AIE program has been effective in enhancing both creative ability and creative personality of elementary school students. Based on these results, several important implications were discussed and some directions for further research were suggested.

Keywords:

• AIE (advertising in education)
• creativity
• creative ability
• creative personality
• creativity education
• elementary education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Most of the student participants in both schools had grown up in a middle-sized city in South Korea with their parents under working class or middle class backgrounds. Also, there was no significant difference in academic achievement according to the results of a recent accredited academic evaluation.

2. Participants’ answers on six activity items in the TTCT language test were scored according to the evaluation guidelines for each of the three subscales of creative ability – fluency, originality, and flexibility – by two accredited raters. In the TTCT language test, raw scores are converted into standard scores with means of 100 and standard deviations of 20. The standard scores of each subscale can be ranged from 40 to 160, in general (Kim 2006).

3. Although answers for some questions in a TTCT language test could be objectively evaluated due to its partly quantitative nature, others required an evaluator's judgment on answers to some degree. For those questions, thus, two raters had a session to comprise score discrepancies between each other and then measured inter-rater reliability to ensure insignificance of differences in the evaluation. See Kim's (2006) study on creativity tests for more details about the evaluation procedure of TTCT.

4. Widely recognized scales to measure an individual's creative personality include Domino (1970)’s creative scale, Gough (1979)’s creative personality scale for adjective check list (CPS), Davis (1982)’s group inventory for finding creative talent (GIFF), Williams (1980)’s test of divergent feeling, Khatena and Torrance (1998)’s Khatena–Torrance creative perception inventory (KTCPI), and so on.

5. Razali and Wah (2011) compared the power of major formal tests of normality – the Shapiro–Wilk test, the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, the Lilliefors test, and the Anderson–Daring test – and found that the Shapiro–Wilk test is most powerful for all types of distribution and sample size.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Sookmyung Women's University [grant number 1-1303-0259].

Notes on contributors

Kyoo-Hoon Han

Kyoo-Hoon Han is a Professor at the Department of Public Relations and Advertising, Sookmyung Women's University. He received his PhD degree from the University of Georgia and Master's degree from the University of Missouri at Columbia. His research interests include advertising effects, new media promotions, and education using advertising.

Jieun Kim

Jieun Kim is a doctoral student at the Department of Public Relations and Advertising, Sookmyung Women's University. She earned her Master's degree in education from Sookmyung Women's University. Her research interests include education using advertising and education for media literacy.