PERFORMANCE AS A TOOL FOR DEVELOPING STUDENTS’ CREATIVITY IN THE PROCESS OF UNDERSTANDING EDUCATIONAL MATERIAL
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32782/psy-visnyk/2025.3.23Keywords:
performance, performative discourse, creativity, psychology of understanding, students, higher education.Abstract
The article is devoted to analyzing the influence of performance on the development of students’ creativity during the process of understanding educational material. It is demonstrated that performance serves as a pedagogical tool, focusing on the development of students’ creative abilities. To confirm this thesis, a questionnaire assessing creative abilities from the Frank Williams Diagnostic System or the Creativity Assessment Packet (CAP) test battery was used. This test battery is designed for a comprehensive assessment of divergent thinking. The methodology was tested for students of the Psychology major at the National University of Ostroh Academy. The sample of students was 90 people, who were evenly divided into experimental and control groups. After implementing performance in the experimental group, we observed positive changes in the scales «Curiosity», «Imagination», and «Risk-proneness». There were no statistically significant changes in the scales «Complexity of the material» and «General level». The increase in curiosity due to performance indicates students’ interest in the new and unusual, which goes beyond the usual models of thinking, thereby deepening their understanding of educational material. It has been proven that performative modeling of situations, staging, and presentations also contributes to the development of imagination, which helps to move from a literal understanding of the material to a conceptual and integrative understanding. It was found that the performance involved open-ended tasks; therefore, it increased the tendency to take risks in uncertain situations and stimulated students to experiment. Altogether, the experiment did not alter the students’ orientation to complex ideas, which can be attributed to the nature of group work and the short-term nature of the study. The overall level also did not show statistically significant changes, despite changes in the performance indicators of most scales. The control group did not exhibit significant changes in any of the scales, confirming that traditional learning, without the interactive involvement of students, does not significantly affect the level of creativity during the studied period. The prospect of this study is to expand the use of performative methods, involve other specialties, and increase the duration of the experiment, which, in aggregate, will reveal the systemic nature of the changes.
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