Interaction of the originality of peers’ ideas and students’ openness to experience in predicting creativity in online collaborative groups

Abstract

Abstract There has been growing interest in the possibility that peers’ ideas can stimulate students’ creativity in group contexts. However, empirical research on this issue is limited. This study tested the hypothesis that peers’ ideas and students’ openness to experience would predict student creativity and attention to peers’ ideas. Undergraduate students ( n = 60) completed creative tasks in an online collaborative group in which the ideas of “peers” were pre‐programmed. Mixed ANOVAs showed support for the hypothesis. Specifically, students with higher (but not lower) openness, when exposed to a high (but not low) rate of peers’ original ideas, paid greater attention to those ideas and were more creative. The implication for education is that teachers should encourage students to share more of their original ideas and to pay more attention to peers’ ideas in online collaborative groups.