Creativity in Childhood: Contexts and Conditions That Foster Children’s Creativity and Innovative Abilities

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Creativity and innovative abilities are critical for making advances in any domain. Children are unlikely to have gained enough knowledge and experiences to make any major contributions yet, but they already demonstrate creative and innovative potentials through play and problem solving in daily lives. Under what conditions are children more creative? This symposium probes the different contextual factors and conditions that foster children’s creativity and innovative abilities.

Paper 1 examined the impact of adult involvement during play on children’s divergent thinking, a critical component of creativity. The study revealed that guided play, which achieves an optimal balance of child agency and adult support, promotes children’s divergent thinking. Paper 2 built on the Construal Level Theory, and investigated the effect of distance priming on children’s innovative thinking. Priming spatial distance through pictures of increasingly distal objects (e.g., school desk to the Milky Way) led to better performance on a tool innovation task. Paper 3 focused on the role of children’s own motivation. Children who felt more competent showed higher levels of exploration and better creative problem-solving abilities than children who felt less competent.

Our discussant will talk about how these findings contribute to our understanding of children’s creativity and innovative abilities, as well as the implications for parents and educators. Collectively, these findings may help design interventions that promote creativity in young children.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• Rongzhi Liu, University of California - Berkeley

Discussant

• Beth Boerger, Slippery Rock University

Individual Presentations

• Fostering Young Children’s Divergent Thinking Through Guided Play - Presenting Author: Natalie Evans, University of Virginia - Charlottesville; Non-Presenting Author: Rachael Todaro, Temple University; Non-Presenting Author: Molly Schlesinger, Temple University; Non-Presenting Author: Roberta M Golinkoff, University of Delaware; Non-Presenting Author: Kathy A Hirsh-Pasek, Temple University

• can Priming Spatial Distance Improve Children’s Ability to Innovate Tools? - Presenting Author: Sarah Beck, University of Birmingham; Non-Presenting Author: Clare Whalley; Non-Presenting Author: Louise E Bunce; Non-Presenting Author: Sarbjit Lagaha

• Feeling of Competence Affects Children’s Curiosity and Creativity - Presenting Author: Rongzhi Liu, University of California - Berkeley; Non-Presenting Author: Fei Xu, University of California - Berkeley