Although the subject of creativity is often among the top issues for those interested in gifted education, it should be of prime importance to everyone. As a nation, we need to pay special attention to some new findings regarding the topic.

 

The cover story in the July 19, 2010 issue of Newsweek is "The Creativity Crisis", by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. The authors define creativity as the production of something original and useful. It requires divergent thinking to generate many unique ideas and then convergent thinking to combine those ideas to find the best result.

 

Bronson and Merryman review the work of E. Paul Torrance that began in the 1950s, when Torrance had 400 children complete his newly designed creativity tasks. Torrance and his colleagues then spent the next 50 years tracking the children, recording all of their creative accomplishments. Through this endeavor, they found that Torrance’s creativity index was incredibly reliable for predicting creative accomplishments as adults. In fact, Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed the data and found that the correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

 

An interesting phenomenon has been discovered when comparing IQ to CQ. With each generation, IQ scores have gone up about 10 points. This was also true of creativity until about 1990 when scores started falling.

 

It is a well-established notion that creativity is extremely important to our country. We constantly need creative approaches to political, scientific, and social aspects of our culture. Around the world, other countries are making creativity development a national priority, with China and the European Union leading this effort.

 

Although some people may be born with a predisposition to be creative, it is also possible to practice the skills necessary to recruit the brain’s creative networks quicker and better. A number of universities are doing research in this area and the conclusion is that creativity can be taught. For example, the National Inventors Hall of Fame School in Akron, OH uses Donald J. Treffinger’s Creative Problem Solving (CPS) method. As mentioned in the Newsweek article, teams of fifth-grade students at the school were given 4 weeks to figure out how to reduce the noise in the library. The library’s windows faced a public space and, even when closed, let through too much noise. The problem, process, and results of this project are excellent illustrations of ways in which creativity can be incorporated into real-life problems and how it can make school relevant while still meeting all the state standards and raising test scores.

 

I think you will find this article worth reading. You may also want to follow up on the research of some of the authorities mentioned in the article.