Claims that, despite apparent decline in productivity in final years of life, seven considerations suggest a far more favorable outlook: role of extrinsic influences; contingency on career age; impact of individual differences in creative potential; interdisciplinary variation in age curves; absence of age decrement on…

Hans Eysenck, who died in September 1997, was one of the most well-known psychologists in the world. A believer that intelligence is genetically controlled, Eysenck recognized the need for scientific investigation in the study of intelligence and creativity. He was characterized by extraordinary creativity and commitment to his scientific message.…

Discusses how creative individuals maintain high levels of variability, examining how Claude Monet's habitually high level of variability in painting was acquired during his childhood and early apprenticeship and maintained throughout his adult career by a continuous series of task constraints imposed by the artist on his own work. For Monet,…

Claiming to have developed a new conceptualization of creative phenomena, Howard Gardner has rounded up the usual biographical suspects in his new book "Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi" (Basic Books, 1993). Gardner doesn't successfully…

This paper presents a psychological perspective of the educational dilemma of assessing highly (high-level) creative ability (with some connections to contemporary philosophical debate). Assessment of highly-creative ability is a topic of longstanding debate involving questions of what constitutes creativity; whether the creative mental process is…

Does assessment kill creativity? In this article, creativity is defined and discussed and an overview of creativity and motivational research is provided to describe how assessment practices can influence students' creativity. Recommendations for protecting creativity when assessing students also are provided.

In this article Chris Cooper conveys something of his passionate belief in the importance of attending to the preconditions of learning. He stresses the crucial role of the imagination in this, bringing, as he puts it, creativity to the process of learning. His account of a drama project based on "The Tempest" provides important insights into the…

The purpose of this study was to explore the engineering problem finding ability of high school students at three high schools in Minnesota. Students at each of the three schools had differing backgrounds including pre-engineering coursework, traditional technology education coursework and advanced science coursework. Students were asked to find…

Intelligence and creativity are concepts used to describe the efforts of human beings to achieve the highest aspirations of the human brain-mind-spirit system. Howard Gardner, intelligence and creativity researcher, applied his Multiple Intelligence theory to case studies of creative masters from seven intelligence domains developing a template…

Though targeted for governmental reform since 2002, services envisioned for gifted and talented students have not materialized in Japan. From the perspective of his personal experience as a Japan Fulbright Memorial Fund participant in 2005 and an extensive review of available literature and contacts with the Japanese Ministry of Education,…

This study attempts to reliably measure literature reading and creative writing ability, and subsequently to determine whether a relationship exists between the two abilities. Participants were 19 eleventh-grade students: 11 were known to be good readers of literature, whereas 8 were known to be poor readers of literature. Each participant read 4…

This article investigates the relationship of learning and its infrastructure using Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate the acquisition of skills needed to succeed in a global economy. We explore the learning phenomenon as a way to bring forward a process of continuous improvement supported by social software. We use a commonly accepted definition…

The recent creation of Web 2.0 applications dramatically alters the ways in which universities recruit and educate students. Technology insiders usually attribute the phrase "Web 2.0" to Tim O'Reilly, author and publisher of the ubiquitous O'Reilly series of technology books (http://oreilly.com). Although there is no shortage of definitions of Web…

This article discusses traditional and contemporary definitions of middle childhood play, the value of such play for children's development and learning, the implications of home, school, and societal practices that have resulted in changing the play scenario of middle childhood, and suggestions for assuring that play's value will be maintained…

Nothing comes closer to "the truth" than a primary source, even a primary source with wart--biases, narrow-minded interpretations, and historical inaccuracies. Students who learn to apply critical thinking to the analysis of primary sources also learn to situate sources within the broader historical context, test hypotheses, form their own…