What can measures of text comprehension tell us about creative text production?

Abstract

Evidence is accumulating that the level of text comprehension is dependent on the situatedness and sensory richness of a child’s mental representation formed during reading. This study investigated whether these factors involved in text comprehension also serve a functional role in writing a narrative. Direct influences of situatedness and sensory richness as well as indirect influences via the number of sensory and situational words on the creativity (i.e., originality/novelty) of a written narrative were examined in 165 primary school children through path analyses. Results showed that sensory richness and situatedness explained 35 % of the variance in creativity scores. Sensory richness influenced the originality/novelty of children’s narrative writing directly, whereas situatedness had an indirect influence, through the number of sensory words, but both pathways influenced the outcomes to a comparable extent. Findings suggest that creative writing requires similar representational processes as reading comprehension, which may contribute to the development of instructional methods to help children in creative writing assignments.