Are Teachers' Implicit Theories of Creativity Related to the Recognition of Their Students' Creativity?

We examine the structure of implicit theories of creativity among Polish high schools teachers and the role those theories play for the accuracy of teachers' assessment of their students' creativity. Latent class analysis revealed the existence of four classes of teachers, whose perception of a creative student differed: two of these classes defined a creative student incoherently with the existing theories of creativity, and the other two classes did that in accordance with Kirton's (1976) theory of creativity styles, that is, as adaptors or innovators. Teachers who perceived a creative student as an adaptor tended to more accurately assess the creativity of females, whereas teachers perceiving a creative student as an innovator more accurately assessed the creativity of males. We discuss the theoretical and practical consequences of these findings.     

Determination of the Classification Role of Person–Environment Fit Scale for Creativity in Workplace Context

This study examined the structure of the Chinese Person–Environment Fit Scale for Creativity (PEFSC) and its classification role. This scale evaluates creativity from the personal dimension, environmental dimension, and their fit. A total of 298 native Chinese employees (aged 17–50 years) from 59 organizations participated in this study. They completed the PEFSC, Creative Self-Efficacy Scale, and the Survey of Perceived Organizational Support. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed the acceptable goodness of fit of the two-factor correlated model of PEFSC. Positive and significant correlations were observed among person–environment fit creativity, creative self-efficacy, and perceived organizational support. Regression analysis indicated that creative self-efficacy and perceived organizational support exhibited differences in the personal and environmental dimensions. Analysis of variance and post-hoc tests showed that creative self-efficacy and perceived organizational support were higher in the group of individuals with high person–environment fit than in the misfit and low-fit groups. This study indicated that PEFSC can be used to measure person–environment fit for creativity effectively and classify highly creative individuals in the Chinese workplace context.     

Teachers’ Perceptions of Creativity in the Classroom

Teachers’ implicit understandings of creativity may not align with current research-based understanding of creativity and characteristics associated with creative students. Even teachers who say they value creativity may actually find creative characteristics undesirable. Participating teachers (n = 371) rated student characteristics on a scale of very undesirable to very desirable. Participants also completed a brief self-assessment of personal creativity and rank-ordered a set of educational objectives based on what they perceived as most important. Results indicated that teachers found student characteristics associated with creativity less desirable than those characteristics contraindicative to creativity (d = 2.70). No effects were found based on the grade level (d = 0.07) and small effects were found for subjects taught (η² = 0.023). Similarly, no effects were found for the teachers’ level of experience (η² = 0.004) or age (η² = 0.002). Teachers’ level of personal creativity was related (r = .248) to how desirable they rated student characteristics associated with creativity, but the importance with which teachers ranked creative thinking had small effects (η² = 0.04) on how desirable they found characteristics associated with creativity. These results generally confirm previous studies and suggest that teachers’ grade level, subject, experience, and age have no effect on their perception of creative characteristics. However, some evidence suggests that teachers who are more creative find student characteristics associated with creativity more desirable in class.     

Educational Science Students’ Implicit Theories of Creativity

This article presents the results of research into the implicit theories of creativity of Educational Science students preparing for the role of educational counsellors. Educational Science students will soon be working in educational institutions where they are expected to support creativity. Prospective (pre)school counsellors were asked about how they perceive and how they experience creativity in their own schooling by means of a questionnaire and focus group interview. Participants’ answers were analyzed using quantitative and qualitative content analyses. The data obtained from the questionnaire showed that the students mainly defined creativity as the characteristic of a person or process. They saw the major possibility for developing creativity during university studies in stimulating teaching activities and a supportive educational climate. The data from the focus group expanded the students’ definition of creativity through the domain of the expression and the valuation of creativity. In the discussion about the development of creativity during university studies, the role of the study program and the students’ individual characteristics were highlighted. The aspects of Educational Science education that need to be changed to increase the quality of the preparation of future educational counsellors are also considered.     

Supporting Creativity Or Conformity? Influence of Home Environment and Parental Factors on the Value of Children's Creativity Characteristics

Although creativity is a desirable skill, parenting for creativity may be quite a challenge and may be less favored than parenting for conformity. The present study aims to investigate parent-related factors that may support creativity versus conformity at home. To this end, this study examined how parents’ attitudes and values toward creativity, creative home environment, and mindful parenting style are related to parents’ perceptions of creative versus socially acceptable characteristics. Analyses of the data collected from 1324 parents (predominantly mothers) indicated that parents were more supportive of creativity traits than socially acceptable characteristics. Most importantly, parents’ attitudes and values toward creativity and creative home environment were significantly and positively related to support for creativity characteristics, whereas mindful parenting was significantly and negatively related to support for socially acceptable characteristics in children. Those findings show that parents who value creativity and set up a creative environment are more likely to support children's creativity. Mindful parenting style seems to indirectly support creativity because it is associated with lower respect for socially acceptable characteristics, some of which are at odds with creativity. Findings are discussed in terms of the implications for training programs that enhance awareness of creativity.     

The Benefits of the Learn to Think Program for Preschoolers’ Creativity: An Explorative Study

This paper presents the Learn to Think preschool (LTT-P) program for promoting creativity in preschoolers and reviews its potential benefits. LTT-P was designed within the framework of the successful LTT creativity program for older students and both were developed to fit the Chinese education system. To assess the potential benefits of LTT-P, a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group study was conducted in a preschool in an urban region in the northwest of China, involving 68 middle level and 87 senior level children. The Lines and Circles subtests of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking were used to examine the development of children's creativity on the dimensions fluency, originality, and elaboration between pretest and posttest. The results suggest that the LTT-P program has the potential to promote young children's creative thinking, especially with regard to the aspects of originality and elaboration. The results for fluency are less clear. To the best of our knowledge, LTT-P is the first program, grounded in a structured learning theory and sound curriculum framework, to support children's creativity development in Chinese early childhood education.     

Whence Creativity?

In this article, I explicate where my theoretical work on creativity has been and where it is going. I describe earlier three‐facet and investment theories, as well as a propulsion model. I then describe my new triangular theory of creativity.     

Development,Use and Implications of Diagnostic Creativity Assessment App,RDCA – Reisman Diagnostic Creativity Assessment

The Reisman Diagnostic Creativity Assessment (RDCA) is a free online self-report creativity assessment that provides immediate feedback to the user and is diagnostic, rather than predictive, with the focus on making the user aware of creative strengths and weaknesses. Several engineering and teacher education studies have included the RDCA over a period of 3 years to refine the document items as a result of factor and statistical analyses. We acknowledge the advantages and disadvantages of self-report instruments and question the traditional use of reliability as a psychometric measure for self-report assessments. Many tools and techniques for enhancing creative factors identified by the RDCA are included.     

Applications of the Speed–Accuracy Trade-off and Impulse-Variability Theory for Teaching Ballistic Motor Skills

Bridging the gap between innovative research and teaching is a fundamental necessity for physical education practitioners to promote motor skill development and competency. This requires practitioners to understand, synthesize, and appropriately apply relevant research from different academic domains in their instructional environments. Ballistic motor skills such as kicking, throwing, and striking are fundamentally integrated into many games and sports and provide a foundation for physical activity and fitness for children and adults. Unfortunately, many individuals do not attain a high level of competence in these types of skills by adolescence. The purpose of this review is to integrate theory, pedagogical best practices, and current evidence on studies relating to Fitts’ Law’s application of the speed–accuracy trade-off and impulse-variability theory to provide an evidence-based framework for promoting effective instructional environments for learning ballistic motor skills.     

Child’s Play: The Creativity of Older Adults

In this article, I discuss Paul W. Pruyser's view presented in his article "An Essay on Creativity" (Pruyser in Bull Menninger Clin 43:294-353, 1979) that creative persons manifest early childhood qualities of playfulness, curiosity, and pleasure seeking and that adaptation is itself a form of creativity. I then discuss his article "Creativity in Aging Persons" (Pruyser in Bull Menninger Clin 51:425-435, 1987) in which he presents his view that aging itself is a potentially creative process, that creativity among older adults is not limited to the talented few, and that older adulthood has several specific features that are conducive to creativity. Significant among these features are object loss (especially involving human relationships) and functional loss (due to the vicissitudes of aging). Noting his particular emphasis on object loss and its role in late-life creativity, I focus on functional loss, and I emphasize the importance of adaptation in sustaining the creativity of older adults who experience such loss. I illustrate this adaptation by considering well-known painters who in late life suffered visual problems common to older adults. I suggest that in adapting to their visual problems these artists drew on the early childhood qualities (playfulness, curiosity and pleasure seeking) that all creative persons possess and that they are therefore illustrative for other older adults who are experiencing functional losses. I conclude with Erik H. Erikson's (Toys and reasons: stages in the ritualization of experience, W. W. Norton, New York, 1977) and Paul W. Pruyser's (Pastor Psychol 35:120-131, 1986) reflections on the relationship between seeing and hoping.     

Creativity and the subliminal manipulation of projected self‐images

Abstract:

This is a report of two experiments on the relationship between creativity and the effects of manipulations of self‐image. Creativity was estimated with the Creative Functioning Test (CFT), an assessment of the tendency to bar the use of subjective interpretations when the support for a “correct” interpretation is being gradually eroded. Self‐image was manipulated in the Identification Test (IT). This involves a backwards masking design in which an ambiguous picture of a face is presented briefly on a viewing screen, preceded by either of two subliminal verbal messages. These were I SUPERIOR and I INFERIOR in a pilot study (n = 25) and I GOOD and I BAD in the main study (n = 33). In the latter, there was also an interview which served to further cross‐validate the CFT. In both studies, creative subjects alternated between reporting young faces and adult ones significantly more often than uncreative subjects. Their identity was not, then, fixedly adult. Creative and uncreative subjects also defended their projected self‐image in different ways against the subliminal manipulations. High and stable self‐confidence was typical of both highly creative and uncreative subjects, but not of subjects in the middle range. Still, the self‐confidence in the two extreme groups was only superficially similar.     

How Does It Feel? The Development of the Experience of Creativity Questionnaire

Creativity research has tended to neglect the phenomenology of the creative process. This article addresses this by describing the development of the Experience of Creativity Questionnaire (ECQ), designed to measure experiential (Part A) and existential (Part B) dimensions of artistic creativity. The questionnaire items were generated on the basis of an earlier qualitative investigation. Participants were 100 artists, from diverse fields of the creative arts. Two Maximum Likelihood factor analyses with Promax rotation were performed on the items comprising the initial ECQ, resulting in 6 factors in Part A and 3 factors in Part B. Factor analyses were then performed on a reduced number of items, providing the basis for 5 scales in Part A (labeled Distinct Experience, Anxiety, Absorption, Power/Pleasure, Clarity/Preparation) and 3 scales in Part B (Transformation, Centrality, Beyond the Personal). The scales demonstrated acceptable reliability, ranging from .82 to.60 (Guttman coefficient). Use of the ECQ in future research will facilitate further investigation of the phenomenology of the creative process and afford greater integration of research paradigms in creativity research.     

Early Childhood Teachers’ Perception of Creative Personality as a Predictor of Their Support of pedagogy important for fostering Creativity: A Chinese Perspective

Previous studies have suggested that teacher’s personality traits and pedagogy are the important areas of investigation in creativity research; however, little is known about the relationship between teachers’ personality traits and creativity-fostering pedagogy. This study proposed a model describing 3 types of perceived personality traits that contribute to teachers’ support of important creativity-fostering pedagogy. The model was tested on a sample of 875 Chinese early childhood teachers. This study first established factorial validity of the measurement scales, the Creative Personality Questionnaire (CPQ) and the Early Childhood Creative Pedagogy Questionnaire (ECCPQ). Confirmatory factor analysis supported the 4-factor structure of the ECCPQ, but failed to replicate the 5-factor structure of the CPQ. An alternative 3-factor model was obtained as a personality measure. The results of multiple regression and structural equation modeling analysis showed that the proposed model was partially supported by the data. Although cognitive abilities factor of creative personality, as expected, was the strongest predictor of self-reported important creative pedagogy, surprisingly openness did not explain unique variance in any of the creative pedagogy factors. One distinct path tapped a relation between the discipline personality traits and teacher-oriented pedagogy was identified, which was seldom addressed in Western creativity research. It may reflect a cultural-specific indigenous variations.     

Creativity on tap? Effects of alcohol intoxication on creative cognition

Anecdotal reports link alcohol intoxication to creativity, while cognitive research highlights the crucial role of cognitive control for creative thought. This study examined the effects of mild alcohol intoxication on creative cognition in a placebo-controlled design. Participants completed executive and creative cognition tasks before and after consuming either alcoholic beer (BAC of 0.03) or non-alcoholic beer (placebo). Alcohol impaired executive control, but improved performance in the Remote Associates Test, and did not affect divergent thinking ability. The findings indicate that certain aspects of creative cognition benefit from mild attenuations of cognitive control, and contribute to the growing evidence that higher cognitive control is not always associated with better cognitive performance.     

Convergent,Discriminant, and Incremental Validities of Person–Environment Fit Scale for Creativity in Predicting Innovative Behavior

This study examined the validity of a 14-item two-factor person–environment fit scale for creativity (PEFSC) to measure the personal and environmental components of creativity. A sample of 2,475 participants completed the PEFSC for evaluating the factor structure. For convergent, discriminant, and incremental validities, a subsample (N = 362) completed the creative self-efficacy scale, support for innovation subscale of the team climate inventory, and innovative behavior measure. Results indicated the two-factor correlated model showed a better goodness of fit than the one-factor model. Measurement invariance of PEFSC was observed across different genders and educational groups. Internal consistency reliabilities were satisfactory (α  ≥  .87). The personal dimension indicated stronger associations with creative self-efficacy than with support for innovation, whereas the environmental dimension was related more closely to support for innovation than to creative self-efficacy. Incremental validity was confirmed by significant and additional explanations from PEFSC in predicting innovative behavior. These results consolidated the application of person–environment fit theoretical framework in creativity research.     

Creativity of university students: What is the impact of field and year of study?

There is a long‐lasting dispute about development of students' creativity in the course of their university education. Both the duration and major field of study may represent the educational effects. To address the issue, the present study collected data (N = 859) from a series of surveys of students in Hong Kong to clarify educational effects by controlling a number of background characteristics and prior scores on creativity. Apart from measuring self‐reported creative traits and creative products, it measured divergent thinking with five tasks to elicit students' creative ideas, which led to scores of fluency, flexibility, novelty, innovativeness, and originality. Results indicate the trend of monotonic decline in creativity with years of study at university and the general superiority of verbal creativity among students of humanities and social sciences, whereas business students had the highest scores on self‐assessed creative traits and products.     

Revisiting the “Art Bias” in Lay Conceptions of Creativity

This article explores the art bias—the pervasive association between creativity and art in implicit theories of creativity. It also attempts to connect creativity research in this area with literature on the theory of social representations. The data comes from an online survey completed by 195 participants mainly from the United States and the United Kingdom. The survey included two main tasks: The first asked respondents to generate as many questions as they can to determine whether an object is creative; the second invited them to rate whether creativity is a key requirement for a list of 16 professions from 4 different domains and recorded the creativity score as well as reaction time. In the end, findings offer partial support for the existence of an art bias. Although artistic professions were scored both the highest and fastest in terms of creativity, participants rarely formulated art-related questions and focused more on aspect, utility, and audience features. This discrepancy is discussed in the end in relation to the polyphasic nature of social knowledge.     

STEP—A System for Teaching Experimental Psychology using E-Prime

Students in psychology need to learn to design and analyze their own experiments. However, software that allows students to build experiments on their own has been limited in a variety of ways. The shipping of the first full release of the E-Prime system later this year will open up a new opportunity for addressing this problem. Because E-Prime promises to become the standard for building experiments in psychology, it is now possible to construct a Web-based resource that uses E-Prime as the delivery engine for a wide variety of instructional materials. This new system, funded by the National Science Foundation, is called STEP (System for the Teaching of Experimental Psychology). The goal of the STEP Project is to provide instructional materials that will facilitate the use of E-Prime in various learning contexts. We are now compiling a large set of classic experiments implemented in E-Prime and available over the Internet from http://step.psy.cmu.edu. The Web site also distributes instructional materials for building courses in experimental psychology based on E-Prime.