A group of thirteen-year-olds once watched a video of a young child having an asthma attack in a classroom somewhere in central London. There was no health class for them. Design and Technology was where they were. They made drawings, prototypes, and child-friendly inhaler packs next, which turned out to say something much bigger about how creativity works than anyone had thought at first.
Following a year-long study at the University of Cambridge, led by researchers Bill Nicholl and Ian Hosking, some very strong results have been found. In one London school, students followed the normal D&T lessons. The students at another school used a set of design-thinking tools meant to help them develop empathy by pretending to be patients, family members, nurses, and caregivers while working together to solve a real problem. The students at the control school did 11% better on the well-known Torrance Test of Creative Thinking at the beginning of the school year. By the end of the year, the intervention group had quickly closed that gap: they got 78% higher scores.
78 percent of the time. That’s not just a small improvement. That’s the kind of number that makes you read the sentence again.
It’s more likely that the results are true because the researchers didn’t just look at overall creativity scores. They split the Torrance Test into parts that were specifically related to empathic thinking, such as open-mindedness and emotional expression. The intervention group also did much better on these parts. To put it another way, it wasn’t just luck or the novelty effect. It was clear that the empathy work was what made the creative gains in each category.
It was made clear by Bill Nicholl, who also trains teachers through Cambridge’s D&T PGCE program: empathy is an important part of the creative process that is missing. Being honest about empathy has been a part of the D&T National Curriculum for more than twenty years, so that’s a quiet but important admission. On paper, it’s been there. It’s just not been taught in a planned way.
There should also be some attention paid to the gender results, not just as a footnote. Over the course of the year, the boys in the intervention school got 64% better at showing how they felt. Girls got 62% better at understanding other points of view. It’s not true that either outcome fits with old ideas about what boys and girls naturally want to do. That’s an interesting thought: the idea that gender roles are in fact a barrier to learning, and that empathy-centered teaching might help break down some of those walls without making that the main goal.
A different study with about 900 students from six countries and help from Dr. Helen Demetriou at Cambridge also found similar patterns. Students’ emotional awareness, behavior in the classroom, and interest in other cultures all changed after even short programs of structured empathy lessons. The kids were between the ages of five and eighteen, which shows that this doesn’t just click at a certain age.
It’s possible that these studies are really showing something that the education system has known for a long time but hasn’t been able to do: that getting kids to really think about someone else’s experience doesn’t make schoolwork easier; it makes it harder. It takes engineering logic, material reasoning, and aesthetic thinking to make an asthma kit for a six-year-old. But first you need to understand what fear feels like when you can’t breathe, what a small child can actually grasp, and what a parent in panic needs to see right away.
