Concrete and Verbal Reinforcement in Creative Thinking of Disadvantaged Children

Abstract

The effects of verbal and concrete reinforcement on creative thinking were investigated in disadvantaged Israeli seventh-graders (N = 90) in a baseline-treatment design. When compared to a no-incentive condition, both concrete (giving a piece of candy for each response) and verbal reinforcement (giving verbal praise to each response) raised the level of ideational fluency on the abbreviated Wallach and Kogan creativity battery by 114% and 61%, respectively. The high correlations between baseline and incentive creativity scores were interpreted as supporting either cognition or motivation but not exclusively the former as the source of individual differences in creative thinking among these disadvantaged children.