The authors of this volume address particular areas of creativity research from the point of view of applications to education. The focus is on understanding, measuring, and developing the creative thinking and problem-solving skills in all students, not simply the intellectually or creatively gifted. The educational psychology of creativity offers a great deal to educators and policymakers in an attempt to respond to the criticism directed at the educational system and to improve instructional practices.
60 educable mentally retarded students from 3 schools in a large urban school system received 9 wk. of instruction from an adaptation of the Productive Thinking Program. Their performance on measures of creative thinking was compared with that of 60 students who received no additional instruction. The conclusions drawn were that (1) special attention to creative thinking training for educable mentally retarded students may be quite effective and results stable over time and (2) the measures of fluency, flexibility, and originality are the most useful in assessing creative thinking for this group.
The present study examines the role of conceptual tempo in creativity and problem solving. It was hypothesized that reflective children would do well on tasks involving an evaluation component, while impulsive children would do well on typical creativity tasks. Measures of creativity, assessing fluency, flexibility, and originality, as well as measures of problem solving, stressing an evaluation component, were administered to 101 white suburban fifth-grade children. Using MFF scores, four groups were identified: reflectives, impulsives, fast-accurates, and slow-inaccurates. Results indicated no significant differences among the conceptual tempo groups on any of the creativity or problem-solving tasks. It is suggested that conceptual tempo may be less effective in predicting differences in some aspects of cognitive functioning at this age. Examination of this hypothesis with younger children is recommended.
Development of problem solving and divergent thinking skills in intellectually gifted children was examined through administration of experimental tasks to 233 second through sixth graders. Different patterns of development were observed: problem solving skills grew steadily from the second through the sixth grades; divergent thinking increased from second through fourth, with no significant increase thereafter. Of potentially greater importance was the fact that children in fifth and sixth grades demonstrated more intra-individual variability across tasks than children in the earlier grades. Implications for curricula to include more divergent thinking tasks were discussed.
