Why do people often fail to find new ideas creative? The literature indicates people fail to find creativity due to ideas having characteristics that are incongruent with people's existing perspectives. The current paper identifies a second reason stemming from the need for evaluators to understand what ideas are before determining if those ideas…

The raison d'etre of this paper is to encourage support for our gifted learners so that they have a better chance to emerge as our visionaries, our thinkers, our inventors, and our innovators. For those well in advance of their peers, what we can do as educators to optimize their vision and its application are the concerns of the paper. It urges…

The addition of the arts to STEM education, now known as STEAM, adds a new dimension to problem-solving within those fields, offering students tools such as imagination and resourcefulness to incorporate into their designs. However, the shift from STEM to STEAM has changed what it means for students to learn within and across these disciplines.…

"Imagination for Inclusion" offers a reconsideration of the ways in which imagination engages and empowers learners across the education spectrum, from primary to adult levels and in all subject areas. Imagination as a natural, expedient, and exciting learning tool should be central to any approach to developing and implementing…

This study explores the usefulness of a creativity construct for arts education. It is hypothesized that an arts orientation is a valid personality construct, that this orientation is correlated with contrasting cognitive skills, and that these skills are manifested in creative behaviors. Sixty-five high school seniors were given the ACT Interest…

An examination of the introspective evidence of artists and scientists on their creative processes suggests that determining the causes underlying the transformation of material in thought is the key for understanding creativity. A similar problem underlies the transformational process of understanding metaphor. T.S. Kuhn's view of scientific…

Determined whether small groups would stimulate creativity more than individualized learning environments for fifth- and sixth-grade students (N=111). Results indicated that small groups were more creative with electrical circuits and that this grouping format should be used in elementary classes. (Author/DH)

Three studies with overlapping participant populations evaluated Amabile's componential model of creativity, which postulates three major creativity components: (1) skills specific to the task domain, (2) general (cross-domain) creativity-relevant skills, and (3) task motivation. Findings of the three studies support Amabile's model. (DB)

Two studies are reported that measure the long-term stability of performance assessments involving story-writing and poetry-writing (involving grade four and five students) and story-telling (involving grade two students). The long-term stability of these assessments compares favorably with stability figures for other creativity tests. (Author/JDD)

This monograph deals specifically with the challenge of recognizing or assessing creativity. It is intended for teachers, program coordinators, administrators, counselors, or researchers who are concerned with such questions as, "Can creativity be measured?" "What assessment tools are available to assist us in recognizing creativity in students?"…

To evaluate Mednick's theory of the creative thinking process, an associative priming paradigm was used to measure latencies to lexical decisions primed by associations of low, medium, or high strength with 20 high-creative and 20 low-creative high school students. Mednick's theory that creative individuals show a flatter associative hierarchy…

This study with 432 college students examined how variables influence the relative performance of groups and individuals on creative problem-solving tasks. Having more ideas available (through a priming manipulation) led to better individual performance. Group performance, however, was enhanced by training appropriate to problem content that…

The predictive validity of original thinking, as measured by two subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, to the performance of real-world creative activities (in such domains as art, drama, sport, music, and dance) was examined in 60 second-graders. Original thinking was significantly related to creative performance but not to…

College students (N=135) were presented with novel, ill-defined problems and asked to select concepts they thought would help solve the problems. The use of concepts organized around long-term goals was positively related to indices of solution quality and originality. (DB)

Uses a case-study approach to examine the role of belief as a catalytic quality in the artistic making and the thinking processes used by children. Describes the processes encountered by children when presented with artistic tasks. Discusses the relationship between belief and the three other main dimensions of artistic thinking and making: social…