Assessing Creative Awareness and Literary Writing Games in the Norwegian Context

This study examines how Norwegian high school students in their first, second, and third years of English (ages 16 to 19, 66 students in total) view creativity and whether divergent-thinking writing games can motivate engagement with literary texts. Conducted over three months in spring 2022, the research combined a pre-game questionnaire, teacher interviews, a three-class teaching intervention totaling 4.5 hours, and feedback sessions. Its central finding is that students were surprisingly open to creativity and games in education, yet they strongly distrusted assessment, increasingly saw writing as a forced obligation as they advanced, and largely regarded themselves as outside the community of writers.

Questionnaire results complicated several expected creativity myths. Students widely viewed inspiration as teachable, and the belief strengthened with age, while only about 1.5 percent knew a writer personally. Self-identification as creative diverged by gender: girls' self-assessment dropped from 67 percent to 36 percent across the three years, while boys' rose from 27 percent to 50 percent. Students' conceptions of creative activity remained narrow, dominated by art and writing, and the intervention itself was tested through three iterations, with the most engaging game being an analogy riddle that asked students to design puzzles from pairs of terms in Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants." The study concludes that clarifying the pedagogical goal of "creative mind" and involving students as game designers were the most effective strategies, while multimodal drawing games fostered collaboration and sharing at some cost to close reading.