Creative
Children
Meaning of Creativity
● From the primitive structure of the human race on it, the world has seen an explosion of ideas in the
fields of science, arts, literature and social science, and man’s current interest accumulating knowledge
about space is nothing more than an extraneous stimulation to deal with novelty in creative thinking.
Some definitions of creativity are as follows:
● “Creative thinking means that the predictions for the individual are new, original and unusual, the
creative thinker is one who explores new areas and makes new observations, new predictions, new
inferences.”
-Skinner
● “Creativity is the ability to see new relationship to produce unusual ideas and to deviate from traditional
patterns thinking.”
-Eysenck
● “Creativity is the ability to see things in a new and unusual light, to see problems that no one else may
even realize it exists, and then to come up with new, unusual, and effective solutions”
-Papalia and Olds
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● Tests conducted by Binet (1911) on creativity have resulted to go through its varied nature and dimensions.
● Rhodes suggested about 50 definitions on creativity and laid stress on- 1. Creativity as a power 2. Creativity as a
product and 3. Creativity as a process.
By critically analysing these definitions, we can understand a few features of creativity:
● Create new things
● New ways of thinking and problem solving
● Uniqueness and originality
● Self-expression
● A capacity of the individual to think differently which was previously unknown to the person concerned and others.
The resultant force in the process of such type of thinking leads one to a novel domain and wakes him to think
properly and purposefully to reach and uncommon goal.
● Guilford (1967, 1987), studied the emergence of creative behavior and defined creativity as the ability to think
differently along a number of clearly defined dimensions.
Characteristics of creativity
● Creativity emphasises on the newness ● Creativity is a natural endowment
● Creativity is often associated with giftedness ● Handicaps do not affect creativity
● Creativity is spontaneous ● Creativity and achievement are not
● Creativity is a special aptitude correlated
● Creativity does not involve single trait ● Creativity includes dynamic thinking
● Creativity is novel to society and individual ● Creativity involves curiosity
● Creativity is expressed in many ways ● Creativity leads towards useful results
● Creativity can be measured ● Creativity leads to go beyond the existing
● Creativity is both a product and a process environment
● Creativity involves divergent thinking ● Creativity develops the ability to see
problem from a new point of view
Are children born creative or made creative?
● Creativity is universal, it is present in everybody
● A large part of being creative is genetic
● George land found that children are born creative but lose their creativity as they transition through life
due to any factors related to their life experiences, schooling, the fear of failure
● creativity can be modelled and relearned
● It cannot be predicted in which circumstances one becomes a creative person
● Intelligence and Creativity: Common belief is that people with high IQ are generally more creative,
people who are highly creative have high IQ. This is not necessarily true. The relation between
intelligence and creativity is complex.
● Personality and Creativity: mental traits and temperament. Tactfulness, self-expression, functional
autonomy and struggle with the environment are the some aspects of the personality of a creative
individual. Most important traits of their personality are freedom, social adjustment, self confidence,
leadership, sensitivity and balanced temperament, they are more thoughtful and more ambitious.
● Grantham (2011) has stated that creativity is subjective and it heavily depends on the context and culture
● “our need will be the real creator”
-Plato
Characteristics of creative children
● Ability to make unusual associations or connections between seemingly unrelated or remote
ideas
● Have the ability to rearrange elements of thought to create new ideas or products
● Have a large number of ideas or solutions to problems
● Display intellectual playfulness, fantasize, imagine, and daydream
● Often concerned with adapting, improving, or modifying existing ideas, thoughts or products
or the ideas or products of others
● Do not fear being different, but may still be emotionally hurt by non-acceptance
● High level of Curiosity
● Frequently challenge teachers, textbook authors, and those in authority or or experts
● Sometimes come up with unexpected, futuristic, bizarre, even “silly” answers or solutions
● Highly creative students may get along or work better with younger or older students, or with
adults
● Originality, intense concentration, commitment to completion, and persistence
● Obsessed with completing varied projects, or exhibit unusual persistence in completing tasks
Theories of Creativity
● Classical Approaches: defined creativity as divine power or madness
● Psychoanalytic approach: emphasizes that one’s unconscious drives or motives are the
spring board of one’s creativity
○ Freud's Theory: takes sex as primary drive of one’s unconscious responsible for
creative expression. Repression and Sublimation is involved
○ Ernest Kris’s Theory: made use of the concept of regression.
○ Jung’s Theory: the art of making use of both personal and collective unconscious
is potent force behind level of creativity
○ Adler’s Theory: Compensatory theory, seeking compensation for perceived
inadequacy and inferiority
● Behaviouristic approach: J B Watson and B F Skinner. assigned importance to one’s
environment and unconscious memories in shaping creative behaviour, conditioning
and psychic material are primary elements in creativity
● Humanistic approach: Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Erich Fromm. Emphasizes the
role of positive, self-fulfilling tendencies, creativity may be cultivated throughout
lifespan, conceptualization of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs
Theories of Creativity
● Cognitive approach: emphasizes the role of mental and intellectual capacity.
○ Galton’s Theory: convergent and divergent thinking, emphasizes on the role of
inheritance
○ William James: emphasizes on both inheritance and circumstances of upbringing,
ability to get in touch with unconscious
○ Graham Wallas: art of thought (1926), four distinct stages of creativity process
■ Preparation, incubation, illumination, verification
○ Max Wertheimer: postulated that creative thinking is the function of formulation
and alteration of gestalts, creative solutions are obtained by perceiving the problem
as a whole
○ Wolfgang Kohler: idea of sudden insight into the solution of the problem,
experiments on chimpanzees, reorganization and reconstruction of fields of
perception result in creativity
Theories of Creativity
● Contemporary approaches
○ Guilford’s Theory: structure of intellect theory, five elements of intellectual
functioning- cognition, memory, convergent thinking, divergent thinking, and
evaluation. Convergent and divergent thinking play substantial role in
carrying out the operation of creative thinking
○ Mednick’s Theory: theory of remote associations, creativity is usually
resulted through ability of establishing remote associations rather than relying
on stereotypes, rigid and common associations to do a task. Functional
rigidity vs. functional flexibility
○ Eysenck's Theory: theory named psychoticism to explain creativity aspects
of human being, link to earliest concept of creativity, experimental evidence-
high psychoticism score, unusual word association responses. Does Not claim
that psychosis produces creativity, example of Beethoven, Mozart, Faraday
and Newton, criticism
