Stimulating creativity and grit of high school students with creative STEM activities: an RCT with noncompliance

Creativity and grit are widely recognized as vital components for the success and prosperity of individuals, even more so for younger people who will have to deal with the complex challenges connected to the digital era. Yet, whether these skills can be learnt or are innate traits is still subject to debate, which is further complicated by the difficulty of defining and, in turn, assessing these concepts. In this study, we challenge the idea that creativity and grit cannot be learnt and show that creative pedagogy activities, such as those offered by FabLabs, are powerful tools to enhance these non-cognitive skills. We conduct a randomized controlled trial in which 710 students from five Italian high schools are randomly assigned to creative STEM courses. The courses are delivered by FabLabs, small-scale workshops that offer access to tools for digital fabrication and employ a hands-on pedagogical approach expected to impact students’ creativity and grit positively. Assignment to the courses is at the class level: only students in classes randomly selected to join the Fablab activities can participate, and they may decide whether to enrol or not on a voluntary basis. We address noncompliance by adopting an instrumental variable approach. We use two modalities to measure creativity: a self-assessment through the Short Scale of Creative Self and an assessment made by an independent expert using an index of creativity developed by the authors. While the effect on self-assessed creativity is not significant, results show that the external, independent assessment of students’ creativity can capture a significant effect of Fablabs’ courses. It also emerges that FabLab activities have a positive significant effect on students’ grit, measured through the Duckworth scale. The encouraging results obtained for a relatively small sample of students should prompt a replication of the experiment on a broader scale.