The relationships between bilingual learning, willingness to study abroad and convergent creativity

Yuan Zhao; Yuan Yuan; Wangbing Shen; Chuanlin Zhu; Dianzhi Liu

doi:10.7717/peerj.7776

The relationships between bilingual learning, willingness to study abroad and convergent creativity

PeerJ. 2019 Sep 26:7:e7776. doi: 10.7717/peerj.7776. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Yuan Zhao^#¹, Yuan Yuan², Wangbing Shen³, Chuanlin Zhu¹, Dianzhi Liu^#¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Education, Soochow University, Suzhou, China.
² School of Rehabilitation Science, Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory of Special Children's Impairment and Intervention, Nanjing Normal University of Special Education, Nanjing, China.
³ School of Public Administration and Business School, Hohai University, Nanjing, China.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Convergent creativity is a form of creative thinking that uses existing knowledge or traditional methods to analyze available information and generate an appropriate solution. The differences in the performance of participants in convergent creativity caused by bilingual learning is a popular research area in creativity. A final sample of 68 participants was asked to complete the remote associates test (RAT). The results indicate that a moderate positive correlation exists between bilingual learning and convergent creativity. Students who want to study abroad perform better on the RAT than those who do not, and this effect is mediated by second language proficiency. These findings suggest that improving students' English proficiency and increasing their opportunities to study abroad may be effective ways to promoting convergent creativity.

Keywords: Convergent creativity; Insight; Language; Overseas experiences.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education Humanities Social Sciences (18YJA190008), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31500870), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20181029), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2017B14514), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2017M621603), China Scholarship Council Foundation (201706715037), and Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu College of China (17KJB190002). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.