The Influence Of The Different Reward-rules On Preschool Children’s Creativity

Rewards as an external stimulus, in the history of research about its impact on creativity, have two opposing views:the behaviorism argued incentives will promote the emergence of individual creativity, while cognitivism pointed out increasing external control (rewards) will destroy the creativity of the individual. Although the two views have been a lot of empirical evidences, they have also been some questions.Therefore, based on those deficiencies, the present study taking preschool children as participants, used experimental method (2×2)to explore the role of reward under the different information guidance. And experiment2further examined the influence of the different reward-rules on preschool children’s creativity.The results are as follows:(1) Incentive group and non-incentive group on children’s creativity scores, there are significant differences.(2) The prompted information group on creativity scores were also significantly higher than the non-prompt group.(3) The creativity scores of the prompted information and rewarded group were also the highest.(4) Reward-processes (task in progress, the end of the task) and reward-category (material rewards, verbal rewards) is independent about children’s creativity.(5) In the case of certain incentive process, young children creativity scores from material-reward group were significantly higher than verbal-reward group.(6) In the case of certain reward types, young children creativity scores from the group that is performing the task were significantly higher than the group that task is completed.(7) In the conditions of the same prompted information, the influence of the different reward-rules on preschool children’s creativity for grade and gender factors, is no significant difference.