Promoting creative thinking in a classroom with Chinese learners: challenges and solutions

Background: Compared with students from western countries, Chinese learners are often characterized as rote, silent, and passive learners. Rote learners prefer repetition and memorization of learning materials given by teachers. Silent learners are quiet and obedient students who are inclined to follow instructions from teachers and authorities. Passive learners are hardworking and assessment-centered students who prefer well-defined and unique model answer in any assessment task contributing to the final grade of the studying course. From the perspective of learning process versus learning product, Chinese learners focus more on the product (as it relates closely to student’s final grade in many circumstances) rather than the process (as it is difficult to assess and quite often will not link to student’s final grade in). Unfortunately, all these characteristics of Chinese learners seem in odds with what we expect for a creative student who has the ability to discover and innovate. As such, promoting creativity in a classroom with Chines learners is a great challenge to educators at all levels, including the post-secondary education.

Main body: In this presentation, we will present the challenge of promoting creative thinking in a classroom of general psychology with a group of Chinese learners from different disciplines in one university. In face of these challenges, we have made corresponding adjustments in the course design and allocated additional resources in the process of course delivery. Findings from an evaluation of the student learning outcomes in this course are promising and our continued efforts in terms of improving the content and delivery of the teaching and learning have been proved to be worthwhile.

Discussion: Based on the evaluation findings, we conclude that promoting creative thinking in a classroom with rote, silent, and passive learners is not an easy task but not impossible. One essential component we find in this study is the importance of professional knowledge of teachers in course design and the resources from the university in delivering high quality teaching and learning environment conducive to promoting student creativity.