Developing creative thinking in a gifted sport enrichment program and the crucial role of attention processes

Abstract

A six‐month longitudinal study (N = 33) proved the influence of a diversified sport enrichment program on the development of creative thinking in team ball sports among gifted children. A contrast between a gifted control group and a non‐gifted treatment group showed that the creative performance of the gifted children significantly improved (partial η² = .26). To explain this surprising short‐term effect, a second experiment chose the Inattentional Blindness paradigm to study the individual differences in the visual attention of gifted (n = 54) and non‐gifted children (n = 58). The results of the monitor‐task by Most et al. (2000) revealed significant differences between both samples in the ‘Near’ condition (delta = .37) but not in the ‘Very far’ condition. The results of both experiments are discussed in connection with further research.

Keywords:

• Diversification
• Self‐controlled learning
• Deliberate play
• Creativity
• Attention

Acknowledgements

A part of Experiment 1 was supported by the Federal Institute for Sport Science (VF 0407/06/12/2001–2002). I am grateful to all the teachers and trainers who trained the two treatment groups; to Marco Nunheim, Karina Gassner, Ina Gootschalk, Michael Hammermeister and Ulf Ottweiler, who judged the creative thinking of all children in Experiment 1; and also to Daniela Baur for helping collect the data for Experiment 2. My thanks go to all the children who participated in the two experiments. Thank you to Steve Most for giving permission to use his monitor task (Experiment 2) and to Nanni Kaiser for her support in data collecting of the gifted children. Special thanks to Aiga Stapf for the comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Notes

1. Most et al. (2000) and our own further studies show that nearly all subjects noticed the unexpected object in the dynamic monitor‐task if they were instructed simply to watch the display without counting the number of black letters that touched the line.