Does Learning from Others in a Classroom Setting Enhance or Damage Creativity?

In the digital age with a wide array of information never before so openly and easily accessible by the general public, students are allowed to access and reference other people’s ideas and works in their learning processes more than ever before in human history. This paper seeks to explore how learning from others in an educational setting could possibly impact on students’ creativity, and more specifically, to examine how the acquisition of two different types of knowledge in students’ learning processes (i.e. acquisition of skill and acquisition of cognitive strategies) could impact on students’ levels of creativity. Apart from delineating the distinct impacts on levels of creativity as a result of two different types of learning contents, this paper also studies how the classroom climate in which students study could moderate the relationship between these two aforementioned types of knowledge acquisition and students’ levels of creativity.