Observing Students' Zone of Proximal Creativity Using a Dynamic Assessment Procedure

• In Event: Innovations in Methodological Approaches in Creativity Assessments for Gifted Student Identification

Abstract

For at least a century, educational researchers have known that student performance on various tasks can be rapidly improved when the affordances of the task are more advantageous; such as with the help of a more knowledgeable other, after direct instruction, or in the presence of additional explanation or hints (Dearborn, 1921). In addition, individual students vary in the degree to which they can benefit from such improved task affordances, meaning that individual differences can exist among students in their baseline/unassisted performance on a task, their improved performance in response to more beneficial affordances, and crucially, in the amount that they are capable of improving between those measurement occasions (Rey, 1934). Vygotsky (1934) famously coined the term Zone-of-Proximal Development (ZPD) to describe this phenomenon in which a critically important attribute of any individual student is their capacity to improve their performance in response to instruction or shifting task affordances. In this session, we bring a dynamic assessment paradigm to the measurement of creative thinking (i.e., by measuring creativity multiple times under multiple conditions) and demonstrate that, analogously to Vygotsky’s ZPD, substantial variance exists in students’ capacity to improve in response to shifting task conditions. Borrowing terminology from Vygotsky’s work, we discuss this observed pattern as the Zone of Proximal Creativity and provide evidence for the relevance of this phenomenon for creativity and giftedness research.
The empirical data presented in this session is drawn from 334 undergraduate participants, who responded to a divergent thinking task under multiple conditions. Some of these conditions were designed to hinder their creative thinking by prompting them to think convergently: such as the condition in which they were instructed to think of “useful or practical” ideas. Others of these conditions were designed to promote their creative thinking by prompting them to think in a more divergent style: such as the condition in which they instructed to think of “surprising or unusual” ideas. To accomplish the measurement in this study, we scored our divergent thinking task using recently developed text-mining methodologies, to ensure that the scores were maximally reliable and valid (Dumas, Organisciak, & Doherty, 2020). Then, taking into consideration the entire pattern of students’ performance across all the conditions, we performed a Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) to identify the latent subgroups among the population of participants. Three latent classes of participants emerged from this model: (a) Conventional Thinkers (7.80% of the sample), whose responses to the divergent thinking task were highly constrained and unoriginal across all conditions (b) Prompted Shifters (66.56%), whose originality significantly increased across conditions as the affordances improved, and (c) Idea Generators (25.64%), whose responses were highly original across all conditions. These latent profiles were validated in regard to personality characteristics and domain-specific creative activities, with Idea Generators reporting significantly more Openness and Intellect, less Industriousness, and more creative activities across the domains of Literature, Music, Sports, Visual Art, Science, and Cooking than did the other latent classes.

Authors

• Denis Dumas, University of Georgia

• Yixiao Dong, University of Denver