Teaching pupils empathy measurably improves their creative abilities

Child-friendly asthma treatment kits designed by pupils who took part in the study, which gave them various empathetic 'tools' to inform their D&T lessons Credit: Designing Our Tomorrow project Teaching children in a way that encourages them to empathise with others measurably improves their creativity, and could potentially lead to several other beneficial learning outcomes, new research suggests. We clearly awakened something in these pupils by encouraging them to think about the thoughts and feelings of others Helen Demetriou The findings are from a year-long University of Cambridge study with Design and Technology (D&T) year 9 pupils (ages 13 to 14) at two inner London schools. Pupils at one school spent the year following curriculum-prescribed lessons, while the other group's D&T lessons used a set of engineering design thinking tools which aim to foster students' ability to think creatively and to engender empathy, while solving real-world problems. Both sets of pupils were assessed for creativity at both the start and end of the school year using the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking: a well-established psychometric test. The results showed a statistically significant increase in creativity among pupils at the intervention school, where the thinking tools were used. At the start of the year, the creativity scores of pupils in the control school, which followed the standard curriculum, were 11% higher than those at the intervention school. By the end, however, the situation had completely changed: creativity scores among the intervention group were 78% higher than the control group.