The Impact of the Core Knowledge Curriculum on Creativity

The Core Knowledge Sequence, which has been proposed as a voluntary national curriculum and has been adopted in many school districts across the United States, is unusually specific about the con- tent students are expected to learn at each grade level. This has led to suggestions that it may promote rote learning and result in a decline in creativity. This pos- sibility was investigated by comparing the creative performance of middle school students who had been attending Core Knowledge schools to that of students at a matched non-Core Knowledge school. There were 3 comparisons: poems written by seventh-grade stu- dents, short stories written by seventh-grade students, and short stories written by eighth-grade students. Experts evaluated the creativity of these stories and poems using a consensual assessment technique. Only 1 of the 3 comparisons yielded a statistically signifi- cant difference, and that difference favored Core Knowledge students. These results suggest that the Core Knowledge Curriculum and its detailed and spe- cific requirements of content to be studied at each grade level do not negatively impact students' creativ- ity and may even have a positive impact on creative performance in some areas.