Should the subjects of liberal arts and science be divided into different subjects or integrated with each other? It is an urgent problem to be solved during the process of basic education reform. From the perspective of multi-disciplinary culture, this study examined the effects of cultural integration of liberal arts and science on high school students’ creative thinking.

By using questionnaire method, Pilot Study 1 and Pilot Study 2 aimed to develop proper experimental materials for disciplinary cultural priming. 178 grade-three high school students and 167 grade-two high school students participated in these studies. Specifically, we compiled and selected different materials of cultural priming of liberal arts and science and examined high school students’ recognition degrees on these materials. Finally, 54 sentences showing the cultural traits of both fields were recognized as the representative materials of culture priming. They included 18 sentences representing the cultural characters of liberal arts (e.g. the students of those subjects were inclined to evaluate in a qualitative way), 18 sentences representing the cultural characters of science (e.g. the students of those subjects preferred to estimate quantitatively), and 18 sentences reflecting the cultures of both fields (e.g. for dressing, the students of liberal arts emphasized the aesthetic part but the students of science concerned on the practicability and comfortableness).

In the formal behavioral experiment, we adopted the research paradigm of cultural priming and examined the impacts of cultural priming on 298 grade-one high school students. These participants were assigned randomly into four different conditions: mixed group of liberal arts and science culture, culture priming group of liberal arts, culture priming group of science and control group. They were required to read the materials of cultural priming and to finish two kinds of creativity tasks: one was an alternate uses task (AUT) from Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) (e.g. “please list as many as possible the uses of a can”) which could be defined as a domain-general task, and the other was a self-complied task based on prior studies (e.g. “please design a multi-functional pen to ensure that its uses can meet the needs of both liberal arts and science students) which could be defined as a domain-specific task. We calculated the scores of both creative thinking tasks from three criterion including fluency (the number of proper answers), flexibility (the category number of proper answers), originality (the novel extent of answers according to two inter-raters assessment), and the composite score of creativity. Our results show that the disciplinary cultural priming has only significant effect on the domain-specific creativity in terms of fluency, flexibility, originality and the total score, and the participants of the discipline cultural integration get a higher score than the other three groups, which shows that the integration of liberal arts and science could promote high school students’ creative thinking.

These results have a great meaning to help people to explore the mechanisms of the effect of multi-culture on individual creativity and foster students' creative competency during high school education in the future.