Teaching development grants final and financial report: Transfer of creative learning in HKIEd: A preliminary study

Domain-specificity is a long debate issue in creativity education (Kaufman and Baer, 2005). Is creative learning in courses of HKIEd domain-specific or producing generic outcomes? Study has criticized that there are only evidence of near transfer, but not far transfer of creative learning. Whereas, other educators comments “there is no point to education apart from transfer…”. For long, the transfer of learning is assumed in many of our courses, however, there is no research evidence to support this assumption. In HKIEd, the evaluation of courses focuses mainly on immediate and localized learning outcomes. The delayed and transferred learning outcomes were seldom studied. In coming years, there would be the new 4/5-year curriculum, the expansion of GE courses and also CCA and SES would offer a minor titled “Creativity through Arts and Science”. The transfer of learning is a pivotal component to the success of this minor and other thinking-related courses. In such a critical time, launching a TDG project to study the transfer of learning is certainly timely. This study would adopt the models of “transfer of learning” from literature. It would take two GE courses offered by SES as cases of study. They are “Exploring Creativity” and “Understanding science and human creation through toys”. Both of them focused on the learning of creativity. In design, their original aims are not confined to the tasks/domains specified, but to transfer the creative learning to other daily-life and learning domains. To attain this purpose, exercises on transfer and metacognitive thinking are emphasized in the courses. This project aims at conducting a longitudinal study on the students who have taken these two courses in the recent two cohorts, and follow them up for one year to investigate how immediate and delayed transfer of creative learning occurred, and to evaluate the ultimate impacts of the courses on their teaching, learning and daily-life. In fact, small scale related studies have been started informally one year ago. If successful, this longitudinal study would be continued. Other supports would be sought to extend this project after one year.