Canvas and quill: Improving students' creativity and writing composition through creative painting diary

• Based on Amabile's Componential Theory of Creativity, a “Creative Painting Diary (CPD)” was developed. • Over 16 weeks, participants completed 80 diaries focusing on writing and painting. • A mixed-method design was adopted to investigate CPD's impact on fifth graders’ creative thinking and writing ability. • Empirical results demonstrated that CPD significantly improved students’ creative thinking and writing composition ability. • Regular writing practice, free space and ethos, and scaffolding featured the effectiveness of CPD. This study developed a “Creative Painting Diary (CPD)” to systematically integrate visual and diary-based elements, aiming to enhance students’ creative thinking and writing abilities. A quasi-experimental design was adopted, in which 48 fifth-grade students were assigned to the experimental (N = 24) and comparison groups (N = 24). To ensure consistency in the instructional approach, all students were taught by the same teacher. Over 16 weeks, students completed 80 diaries on topics aligned with the Ministry of Education's Curriculum Guidelines. The key difference was that the experimental group focused on both writing and painting through CPD, whereas the comparison group focused solely on writing composition. Grounded in Amabile's Componential Theory of Creativity, the CPD approach offers essential scaffolding to enhance students’ domain-relevant knowledge, creativity-relevant skills, and intrinsic motivation. The research employed a mixed-methods design, incorporating quantitative assessment of creative thinking and writing tests alongside qualitative interviews. The findings demonstrated that students in the experimental group achieved significant improvements across different creative thinking dimensions (i.e. fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration) and writing composition (i.e. materials, organisation, sentence structure, wording, and creativity), unlike the comparison group. Although the two groups had very similar baselines with no significant differences across all aspects, the experimental group significantly outperformed the comparison group in writing ability (sentence structure and creativity) and creativity (fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration). Qualitative findings substantiated these results, highlighting three essential features of the CPD that contributed to students’ development: regular writing practice, free space and ethos, and scaffoldings for creative thinking strategies and material selection. Compelling evidence supports the integration of visual and diary elements in curriculum design, which can significantly enhance students’ cognitive and creative capabilities. This research offers a practical and innovative framework for future studies and educational practices.