Creative writing: Thinking beyond the standard text Teaching high school students to write original texts

The main aim of this dissertation was to design and test short courses for creative writing in secondary education. Therefore, we developed design principles to frame the design process. In Study 1 (Chapter 2), we investigated the difference between creative and communicative writing processes. In Study 2 (Chapter 3), we designed a narrative writing course and examined whether this course improved the quality of high school students' communicative and narrative writing and affected their writing process. In Studies 3 and 4 (Chapter 4), we examined whether including creative thinking in a communicative writing course increased the originality of communicative texts and influences students' writing process. In all these studies we explored the contribution of writing motivation and creativity on the writing process and text quality. Finally, to complement our design principles with new findings, we conducted a meta-analysis on creative writing in secondary education in Study 5 (Chapter 5).
Our results showed that the creative writing process differs from the communicative writing process: it enhances text production and writing flow. Furthermore, creative writing instruction matters; it influences students' text quality and writing processes in terms of speed. We found that creative writing instruction transferred to communicative text quality, especially for students with a relatively high creative self-concept, but not vice versa. For writing processes, however, there is a transfer effect from communicative to creative writing: even when training divergent thinking for communicative writing, students' narrative text production is enhanced. Finally, motivation played a key role in all our studies: students with positive attitudes toward writing wrote better narrative and communicative texts.