Building on divergent thinking: Expanding approaches to measuring children’s creativity

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Creativity is a desirable skill that should be cultivated from a young age (Lucas, 2016), yet our understanding of how children’s creative behavior develops is limited. Creative potential is traditionally studied using divergent thinking (DT) tasks, which involve generating responses to an open-ended prompt. However, extending and supplementing creativity assessment with other measures is likely to yield a deeper understanding of creativity and its development.

The talks in this symposium explore children’s creativity, both using and extending beyond canonical DT procedures to probe children’s creative processes.

The first paper shows a lack of association between children’s self-reported creativity and scores on a DT task, with self-reported creativity higher in early elementary school children than later elementary and middle-school students. In the second paper, the traditional DT method is modified by explicitly prompting children to generate “creative” ideas and subjectively rating creativity rather than using typical count-based scoring; results suggest this method can help uncover the contribution of children’s executive function skills to idea-generation. In the final paper, video games are used as both a means of fostering creativity and a window on children’s creative processes. Video game type (open-ended vs. narrative) does not relate to DT performance, but children’s descriptions of their creativity within the game are more task-focused in the narrative game and more originality-focused in the open-ended game.

After the three talks, the chairs will lead an interactive discussion of lessons learned from these projects and future directions for diversifying creativity measurement to better understand children’s creative processes.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chairs

• Julie Vaisarova, Arizona State University

• Natalie Evans, University of Virginia - Charlottesville

Individual Presentations

• Measuring creativity: Assessing self-reported creativity and divergent thinking across school aged children - Presenting Author: Natalie Evans, University of Virginia - Charlottesville; Shoronda Erica Matthews, Boston University; Jamie J Jirout, University of Virginia - Charlottesville

• Can young children control their creativity? The role of executive function in modifying creative processes - Presenting Author: Julie Vaisarova, Arizona State University; Stephanie M Carlson, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• The effects of game structure on video game and cognitive creativity in children - Presenting Author: Darian Stapleton, George Mason University; Thalia Raquel Goldstein, George Mason University