Poster #22 - Capturing creative potential in preschoolers

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Creativity is a vital 21st century skill (Lucas, 2016). To foster it in children, we must first be able to define the construct and measure it. Yet both of these issues have been challenging. A review of the childhood creativity literature found that out of 112 peer-reviewed articles, 82% measured creativity as divergent thinking (Evans et al., unpublished manuscript). Newer work suggests that divergent thinking is too narrow a definition of the construct (Baer, 2011). Creativity likely reflects both creative potential (personal and cognitive processes) and achievement (creative products) (Barbot et al., 2015). The Center for Childhood Creativity proposed several components that might contribute to creative potential, such as originality, flexibility, decision making, and motivation (Hadani & Jaeger, 2015). These components broaden our view of creativity beyond divergent thinking. Yet, to date there are no creativity measures for children that allow us to assess these features.
Derived from the analogical reasoning literature, we designed a task in which children are asked to remove a ball from a thin jar using everyday objects like a rubber band, chopstick, and spoon (Daehler & Chen, 1993; see Figure 1). Success on this task requires children to explore the properties of the objects and make object combinations, which requires the creative components of originality, flexibility and decision making. Furthermore, children must persist with manipulating objects and making attempts, which requires motivation. We hypothesized that this task would allow us to investigate not only success, but the processes children used to achieve that success. We predicted that to successfully retrieve the ball children would explore more objects, make more unique object combinations, spend a greater proportion of time manipulating objects, and spend a greater proportion of time attempting than non-successful children. Fifty-seven children ages 5 and 6 (M=72.49, SD=6.48) were given 8 minutes to retrieve the ball as many times as possible. Coders were trained to distinguish object interactions as touches, manipulations, and attempts before they analyzed the videos. Two coders overlapped for 18% of the videos with an average kappa of 0.86.
Three of the four hypotheses were supported. Successful children explored more objects [t(55)=2.14, p=0.034, d=0.58], made more combinations [t(55)=2.60, p=0.012 d=0.69], and spent a greater proportion of time manipulating (t(55)=2.94, p=0.005 d=0.78). Non-successful children spent a significantly greater proportion of time attempting to retrieve the ball [t(55)=-3.49, p=0.001, d=0.92]. These results suggest that successful children who spent more time exploring and manipulating objects were more likely to carefully consider their options; whereas non-successful children might use more of a trial-and-error process, engaging in impulsive behavior and focusing on achieving the goal rather than planning a successful strategy.
This task offers one attempt to examine creative potential. It augments the current literature by moving beyond divergent thinking tasks to capture process level features of creativity such as originality, flexibility, decision making, and motivation.

Authors

• Natalie Evans, Temple University
  Presenting Author

• Emily Hopkins, University of Scranton
  Non-Presenting Author

• Molly Schlesinger, Temple University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Univ of DE
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Temple University
  Non-Presenting Author