Digital Knowledge Searching

Depth and Individual Creativity

YU-MING FEI, CHIUHSIANG JOE LIN
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Chung Yuan Christian University, Chung Li, Taiwan

Received 6 October 2009; accepted 3 May 2010

ABSTRACT: The research studies the relation of the learner’s knowledge searching depth to his/her creativity
when learner comes into contact with constructed knowledge. The digitized constructed knowledge environment
has changed the way that knowledge has been presented through the books. By using information technology,
learners now obtain knowledge rapidly in a computer-learning environment. When a learner facing a project, the
way he/she searches information to build up his/her knowledge becomes a subject which is well worthy a discussion.
This research first recorded each student viewing the mission-related instructional materials on computer pages
in limited time. Followed by analyzing the route of subject’s cognitive processes to study the relation of students
who with different creativity performances to their knowledge searching depth. The participants are vocational
high school students from the innovated project design class and their projects in this experiment are creative
poster design. Researchers recorded and analyzed participants’ viewing routes among supplied poster-design
instructional materials. Researchers expect to find out the relation by discussing the knowledge searching process
between different creativity performers. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ; Published online in
Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com); DOI 10.1002/cae.20464

Keywords: depth-first; creativity; knowledge searching depth

INTRODUCTION
This research discussed the knowledge searching depth of different
creativity learners when they come into contact with constructed
knowledge frames. Pask and Scott [1] verified that learners had
diverse learning strategies when they applied different instruc-
tional materials. Furthermore, Ford [2,3] pointed out that when
there is a constructed knowledge frame, learner’s learning process
can be discussed by learning depth and learning breadth. There
are two major reasons for classifying knowledge learning process
into learning depth and learning breadth: (1) easily and objec-
tively be defined, evaluated, and verified; (2) easily be understood
and applied by teachers and other instructional material designers.
Wesche and Paribakht [4] and Ye and Salvendy [5] both adopted
depth-first and breadth-first, two cognitive process strategies, to
analyze student’s understanding of system design.
The depth-first and the breadth-first searching calculation
methods are mostly applied in software engineering to build knowl-
edge system searching program, for example, Blake and Jalics [6]
assessed using C++ language in writing object-oriented model;
Ye and Salvendy [5], as testers had different understanding of
computer program, analyzed the techniques and strategies used
by testers when they finished the program interpreting mission.
It had also been increasingly adopted in current researches to
analyze instructional knowledge searching strategy. For example,
Correspondence to C. J. Lin (hsiang@cycu.edu.tw).
© 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Lin et al. [7] found out that when individual is interpreting the
diagrammatic knowledge frame, advanced learners prefer more
depth-first strategy to beginners. In addition, instructional mate-
rials design-related researches also used same analyzing method,
for example, Ford and Chen [8] compared breadth-first and depth-
first designed instructional materials and the relation to students’
learning, they found out that students whose cognitive character
were field-dependent preferred breadth-first instructional materi-
als and students whose cognitive character were field-independent
preferred depth-first instructional materials.
From researches mentioned above, we can say that when
knowledge has constructed frame, depth-first and breadth-first
strategies can be used to analyze individual’s knowledge search-
ing strategy. In this case, when computer instructional materials
have constructed frame, same strategy can also be used to ana-
lyze learner’s knowledge searching depth. This research will be
able to objectively assess different creativity learner about their
knowledge searching depth.
PROBLEM DEFINITION
Creativity
The school may influence students’ development of creativity
through the activities, curriculum, evaluations, classroom climate,
and most of all, teacher’s attitude. Tan [9] has recently suggested
that schools should provide varied activities, open atmosphere,
and changes to the traditional ways of evaluation. Some litera-

1
2 FEI AND LIN
Figure 1 The figural of WTCT: (a) Chinese character “ ” and (b) a fan.
ture review [9–16] have helped us to ascertain that the following
factors have positive effects on technological creativity: (a) teach-
ers are supportive of students ideas and encourage their creative
performances; (b) schools provide opportunities for creative per-
formances, such as competitions, social clubs, and study clubs; (c)
curriculums provoke and improve creative thinking; and (d) school
environments are free and open. Such factors, of course, provide
students a better way to show their technological creativity in their
study.
Technological creativity product has been widely investi-
gated, and measures for these two following characters have been
proposed. Csikszentmihalyi [17,18] emphasized creativity must
produce the influence of a certain degree on the environment, cre-
ativity must have been changed and already had a field, or there
is a field that has changed to any idea, behavior, or product which
become a new field. In other words, as long as the products are
evaluated through the expert’s common understanding, they can
reach novelty and appropriateness, it is called creativity [19,20].
Creativity Assessment System
Creativity tests can highlight strengths in children who previously
have been viewed as school problems [21]. The Torrance’s Test of
Creative Thinking (TTCT) is one of the most commonly used tests
among them. The TTCT was developed by Torrance in 1966. It has
been reformed four times: in 1974, 1984, 1990, and 1998. There
are two forms (A and B) of the TTCT-Verbal and two forms (A
and B) of the TTCT-Figural. In this study, only the TTCT-Figural
was discussed. The TTCT has been translated in more than 35
languages [22]. The TTCT have been used in over 2,000 research
studies [23].
The TTCT has been adapted by Wu [24] in Chinese, as a
measurement scale to evaluate students’ creativity. Wu validated
the adapted version on Taiwanese students and found high test reli-
ability with the inter-rater reliability ranging from 0.98 to 0.79 and
test–retest reliability ranging from 0.60 to 0.42. In Wu’s version
of TTCT (WTCT), respondents were given various different sizes
and shapes of a Chinese character as shown in Figure 1a, which
means people, in a figural test.
Participants were asked to apply this Chinese character as part
of a picture, and to draw as many as pictures they could within
10 min. Participants had to break their preconditioned thinking
about the meaning of this Chinese character to come up with var-
ious pictures that include this character. One example is shown in
Figure 1b.
The Grading of Creative Thinking Test System (GCTTS)
was developed for the creative achievement system that assesses
achievement across three domains of the creative thinking test
(Fluency, Flexibility, and Originality). The system main function
computerizes the expert assessment work (grading and coding
data; see Fig. 2).
The system in GCTTS concentrated on how to give the flexi-
bility score and originality score accurately. There are three steps.
Figure 2 The creativity assessment system.
First, the GCTTS transforms the creativity index into a detailed
record database. Second, it uses structured query language (SQL)
to achieve the grading tasks (search, judge, and recode) as an
expert. Finally, continued improvement in the creativity index
database is performed when more participants’ ideas are obtained.
For the GCTTS, the following hardware and software were
used: a desktop 3.0 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor with 256 MB
of RAM and Microsoft Access 2002. The program has been devel-
oped in Microsoft Access 2002 to run under Microsoft Windows
XP. A minimum of 100 MB of hard disk space is required, a
Pentium 2 processor (minimum) and a minimum of 128 MB of
RAM.
Learning Structuring With Learning Styles
A number of studies have investigated the effects of matching
and mismatching instruction with students’ cognitive and learning
styles. Several have provided empirical evidence which suggests
that learning in matched conditions, in which instructional strat-
egy is matched with students’ cognitive and learning styles, may
in certain contexts be significantly more effective than learning
in mismatched conditions. Pask and Scott [1] found that learning
outcomes were dramatically affected when individuals were pre-
sented with learning materials that were matched and mismatched
with their information processing style.
In a study by Ford [2], 25 postgraduate students were
pretested for learning style using the previously described Short
Inventory of Approaches to Study and Study Preference Ques-
tionnaire. Then the learned two sets of subject matter from two
teaching packages, one designed to fit a Holist strategy and the
other designed to fit a Serialist strategy. The materials were based
on those used by Pask and Scott in their original experiments. The
subject matter, designed to minimize students’ prior knowledge,
related to species of imaginary Martian creatures—“Clobbits” and
“Gandlemullers.” Learning was assessed by means of a simple test
of factual recall. Learning in matched conditions was significantly
superior to learning in mismatched conditions.
This study sought to investigate the effects of matching
and mismatching instructional materials, structured according to
a key feature of Pask’s Holist and Serialist approaches, with
Witkin’s Field-dependent/-independent cognitive styles. The key
feature selected related to the difference between “depth-first” and
“breadth-first” navigational paths. Figure 3 shows the essential
difference in structure between the two approaches. Depth-first

Figure 3 (a) Depth-first structures and (b) breadth-first structures.
search is an uninformed search that progresses by expanding the
first child node of the search tree that appears and thus going deeper
and deeper until a goal node is found, or until it hits a node that
has no children. Then the search backtracks, returning to the most
recent node it has not finished exploring. In a non-recursive imple-
mentation, all freshly expanded nodes are added to a stack for
exploration. Breadth-first search is an uninformed search method,
too. It aims to expand and examine all nodes of a graph or com-
bination of sequences by systematically searching through every
solution. In other words, it exhaustively searches the entire graph
or sequence without considering the goal until it finds it. It does
not use a heuristic algorithm.
This paper describes the experimental protocol that was used
to collect the strategies and skill differences exhibited by trained
and beginning programmers in the comprehension of a data flow
model.
RESEARCH DESIGN
Participants
Depending on research purpose and need, the research tools had
been used in this research including Wu’s Chinese version of TTCT
[24] and the creative poster design computer instructional materi-
als, which are supplied by the researchers. The participants were
45 vocational high school students from a selection of schools in
Taiwan. They were all seniors who majored in computer science
from Yu-Chang Vocation High School. All students were asked
to take the WTCT (Jing-Jyi Wu’s Test of Creative Thinking). The
creativity performances of participant were evaluated by Fei et al.’s
[25] Creativity evaluation system (GCTTS) and were divided into
three groups: high creativity group, average creativity group, and
KNOWLEDGE SEARCHING DEPTH & CREATIVITY 3
Table 1 The Knowledge Level for Material
The knowledge level Number of pages
Depth 0 1
Depth 1 1
Depth 2 3
Depth 3 15
Depth 4 31
Depth 5 6
Total 57
low creativity group. However, we only picked the total of 22 stu-
dents who were with high creativity (test scores were 75 percentile
and above) and low creativity (test scores were 25 percentile and
below) to conduct our experimental model which is presented in
the following paragraphs.
Learning Material
Cognitive effects of IT are not automatic and cannot be taken for
granted. The mere use of computer-based tools does not promise
that these tools will indeed function as “cognitive tools” [26–29].
A PowerPoint material has been designed to teach students how
to design a poster. The knowledge level of material is shown in
Table 1. It consisted of three main chapters from level 3. Students
in prior-exposure conditions read a chapter and then push “return
button” to go back or to choose a next chapter or sub-chapter. Each
chapter or sub-chapter had two to six pages information to help
student to design a poster.
Experiment Procedure
In this study, we are interested in searching depth of different cre-
ativity students. Both high creativity and low creativity students
were chosen. All two groups of students were asked to design a
topic poster. Each student had 10 min to learn from supplied cre-
ative poster design computer instructional materials. The subject
could read along the materials in any order they liked. When stu-
dent viewed the materials, the learning process was recorded by
software program. The recorded learning process included com-
puter page number and viewing time for each page.
Limitations
This study is an exploratory study. We use a quantitative research
methodology to count student-reading processes that may have
been otherwise difficult to discern. However, this methodology
harbors several limitations: The relatively small sample size does
not enable us to generalize our results. Our results are obviously
affected by the specific characteristics of the researchers we inter-
viewed, for example, their particularity, academic experiences,
family background, etc.
RESULTS
The Score of Creativity
The mean Creativity score of the 45 students in this study was
146.9 (SD = 26.79, min = 89, max = 198). The design model sum-
mary table (Table 2) indicates significant main effect for group
(F = 76.09, P < 0.001).
4 FEI AND LIN

Table 2 ANOVA for Creativity

Source DF F P-value

Group 2 76.09 ***

*P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001.

The Creativity score of high creativity group was 11 students

(mean = 180.36, SD = 11.95), average creativity group was 23 stu-
dents (mean = 147.00, SD = 13.96), and low creativity group was
11 students (mean = 113.27, SD = 10.57).

Reading Depth-First
The average reading depth was computed as the levels reached into
Figure 4 Reading path of high creativity student.
the page for each same direction move before turning back. There
was no significant difference between the low creativity students
and high creativity students (P = 0.16).
Table 3 shows t-test for Creativity on three variables. As this
level exceeds our ␣-value (5%) we accept our hypothesis and do not
believe in any differences in student’s creativity. The mean depth
was 1.32 and 1.26 levels for the low creativity students and the high
creativity students, respectively, indicating that the project-related
subject tended to go deeper into the diagram at each same direc-
tion move. However, the number of downward moves in reading
along the instructional materials was significant with 56.8 moves
for the low creativity students and 33 for the high creativity stu-
dents (P = 0.001). This indicated that the high creativity students
used fewer steps in getting what they needed to learn from the
instructional materials.
Additionally, the average elapsed time was 3 and 8.87 s for
the low creativity students and the high creativity students, respec-
tively, indicating that the high creativity students stayed longer on
some corresponding pages. Figure 5 Reading path of low creativity student.
Figure 4 shows high creativity students reading path. The
students used the vertical reading technique at the beginning but
Time Benefit
stopped at the target pages which may refer to their poster projects.
Subject 05 (Fig. 4) ended vertical reading at approximately 360 s. From Figures 4 and 5, different creativity students appeared to
Therefore, the subject 05 ended vertical reading about half way have divergent reading processes. In this experiment, the time
through the PowerPoint model. The subject 02 belonged to low 600 s was further been divided into three sections: 0–200, 201–
creativity group and the reading path is shown in Figure 5. The 400, 401–600 s as time factor for more analysis. Creativity and
subjects at all times of performance used vertical reading through- time section factors were put into consideration together and two-
out the PowerPoint model. Thus, the majority of the subjects used way ANOM analysis method was adopted in this research. The
vertical reading effectively during the experiment. analysis of means (ANOM) is a good way for further analysis
Horizontal reading is indicated in the graph by a pattern of because it not only answers the question of whether or not there
attention in which attention is switched between the design docu- are any differences among the factor levels but also tells us which
ments. In the graphs, the indications of a focus of attention on the levels are better and which are worse when there are differences
diagrams are enclosed in the dotted-line shape. The results of this [31].
phase of the analysis support the idea of Travassos et al. [30] that As shown in Figure 6 interaction effects, there was no dif-
both vertical and horizontal reading techniques are employed by ference both in creativity and time section. Also in main effects
reviewers in the model. for creativity, there was no difference between different creativi-

Table 3 t-Test for Creativity

Low creativity students (Na = 11) High creativity students (Nb = 11)

Variable M SD M SD t-Value

Average reading depth 1.319 0.026 1.259 0.082 1.549

Number of downward moves 56.80 3.11 33.00 10.02 5.07∗
Average elapsed time (s) 3.00 0.72 8.87 3.25 −3.93∗
∗
P < 0.05.
 KNOWLEDGE SEARCHING DEPTH & CREATIVITY 5

Figure 6 Two-way ANOM for average reading depth by creativity, time section.

ties, which were in accord with the t-test shown in Table 3. But
from Figure 6 main effects for time section, participant’s reading
depth was influenced by time variation although it did not reach
the significant level.
As shown in Figure 7 interaction effects, there was signif-
icant difference both in creativity and time section, participants
with high creativity and low creativity both showed significant
difference in the third time section. High creativity participant’s
number of downward moves distinctly increased in third time
section. Same as low creativity participants only their number of
downward moves distinctly decreased in third time section. This
phenomenon was very interesting because if we only looked into
the main effects of creativity and did not consider different time
sections and we would have a different result as high creativity
student used fewer steps in getting what needed to learn from
the instructional materials. From Figure 7 main effects for time
section, participant’s number of downward moves was distinctly
influenced by time variation in all participants especially there was
significant difference in second time section.
As shown in Figure 8 interaction effects, there was no dif-
ference both in creativity and time section. But in main effects for
creativity, there was significant difference between different cre-
ativities, which were in accord with the t-test shown in Table 3. The
main effects for time section in Figure 8 shows that participant’s
average elapsed time was influenced by time variation although it
did not reach the significant level.

Figure 7 Two-way ANOM for number of downward moves by creativity, time section.
6 FEI AND LIN
Figure 8 Two-way ANOM for average elapsed time by creativity, time section.
DISCUSSION
There are several interesting findings in this research. First, we
found out that using computer-based materials did attract students’
attentions. Both high creativity and low creativity students spent
time doing the browsing. Referring to Figures 4 and 5, in the first
400 s, both high creativity and low creativity students did use the
PowerPoint model to glance through different chapters and sub-
chapters.
Second, we discovered that in the next period of time which
was 400–600 s (refer to Figs. 4 and 5), high creativity students
showed their interest in some specific topics and stayed longer on
some corresponding pages. This finding tells us that high creativ-
ity students would actually use these materials to generate some
valuable information for their project use because they tended to
go deeper and narrower to the sub-topics and spent more time on
them.
Third, we also found out that students with low creativity had
hard time to get the useful information through the model. The
reason was that they kept searching the pages back and forth at all
time during the experiment without focusing on specific topics. In
other words, it was difficult for them to use this model to obtain
information for their poster design projects.
Therefore, we, as teachers, our mission is to help our students
especially to those who with low creativity to define, to search,
and to express their projects by designing a better teaching model
(computer-based, of course) in assisting them. In addition, reading
comprehension trainings and other tools, that is, group discussions
or brainstorming may be used in the future to persuade students to
generate ideas and then increase their cognitive abilities easily.
CONCLUSION
This research applies human cognitive theory to the complex task
of knowledge learning strategy. From the experiment result, stu-
dents with different creativities adopted different strategies in
different time sections when they read computer-based materi-
als. When we analyzed the number of downward moves by time
section, there was significant difference in second time section
which means participants changed their reading strategy dur-
ing this period. Also high creativity student would adopt fewer
searching steps and spend longer reading time in computer-based
materials. The study findings support the central thesis of cogni-
tive theory that how an individual processes information, impacts
the creativity, and extends the boundaries of the theory to include
search-type with visual and diagrammatic stimuli. For the educa-
tion field, the study showed that the knowledge searching depth of
high creativity students and low creativity students were signifi-
cant different. The learning strategy of high creativity students can
be viewed as better knowledge learning group.
Our future research will explore whether a learning strategy
is based on innate proclivities and/or whether a learning strategy
can be taught or guided. Thus, future research directions will focus
on helping students/learners to be trained in more effective cogni-
tive strategies for knowledge learning. Moreover, an assessment of
how effective indexes can be developed to understand individual’s
difference and knowledge specifically required.
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BIOGRAPHIES
Yu-Ming Fei is a Ph.D. candidate in Department
of Industrial and Systems Engineering, College
of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
Chung Yuan Christian University, Taiwan. His
research interests include Ergonomics, Human
Computer Interface, and Creativity Problem Solv-
ing. His email address is fander@cute.edu.tw
KNOWLEDGE SEARCHING DEPTH & CREATIVITY 7
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Chiuhsiang Joe Lin is a Professor in Department
of Industrial and Systems Engineering, College
of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
Chung Yuan Christian University, Taiwan. He
received a Doctoral Degree from the Graduate
School of Industrial Engineering at Texas Tech
University, USA. His teaching and research
interests include Ergonomics, Occupational
Biomechanics, and Human Computer Interface.
His email address is hsiang@cycu.edu.tw