Leaving space for imagination: mental imagery-informed teaching framework for enhancing imagery vividness in creative writing

Currently, many multimodal materials, such as pictures, videos, and audio, are used in undergraduate creative writing classes. However, students still commonly feel a “lack of visual imagery” during the ideation process and difficulty in arousing emotions. Psychological research indicates that mental imagery is a crucial internal simulation mechanism supporting creative output. Nevertheless, higher education rarely sets “vividness of mental imagery” as an explicit teaching objective. Based on this, this study proposes a mental imagery-oriented teaching framework, “leaving space for imagination,” which systematically guides students to generate and refine multisensory mental imagery by controlling the cue modality and the level of explanatory explicitness. A single-group pre-test and post-test design was adopted with 100 undergraduates majoring in media- and film-related fields at a Chinese university. The core of the class was the “four-stage lesson structure”: introduction and goal-focusing, single-modality cueing, mental imagery generation and initial writing, and work sharing and imagery-focused refinement. The Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire and Plymouth Sensory Imagery Questionnaire were measured before and after the teaching unit. Pre–post changes were analysed using paired-samples t-tests, with paired-design effect sizes estimated using Cohen’s dz. Paired-samples t-tests indicated pre–post increases in VVIQ, t(99) = 18.45, p < 0.001, ΔM = 11.48, 95% CI (10.25, 12.72), and PSIQ total, t(99) = 14.93, p < 0.001, ΔM = 20.34, 95% CI (17.64, 23.04), with large paired-design effect sizes (Cohen’s dz). All seven PSIQ sensory subscales (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, bodily sensation, and emotional imagery) also increased from pre-test to post-test. Overall, the findings provide preliminary evidence that a low-specification, single-modality cueing approach can be integrated into regular undergraduate creative writing instruction and is associated with increased self-reported imagery vividness. Future work should incorporate comparison groups, product-quality assessment, and process measures to test transferability and longer-term effects on creative outputs.