Insights into the Creativity Process

Creativity is an extremely complex process to understand. The topics in this section examine contemporary research and thinking on this process and its implications for fostering creative thinking, teaching and curriculum. These topics are studied in Understanding and Teaching for Creativity.

Outline 2006

Personality and Creativity
Personality and motivational theories of creativity. Do particular motivational and other emotionally-related characteristics in children's lives promote adult creativity? Aspects of this topic are examined in this paper.

Stage Models of Creativity
The Stage Models of Creativity. The stage models of creativity describe how a person needs to act on what they know in order to produce creative outcomes. They examine creativity in terms of the processes used to change or modify one's knowledge in order to generate creative outcomes. This paper reviews some of the stages models.

Sternberg creativity
Robert Sternberg attributes creativity not to what one knows in terms of domain knowledge, but how individuals decide how to use what they know. Sternberg's model of creativity is that you are more likely to get creative outcomes when individuals decide how to use what they know in particular ways. This paper discusses particular aspects of his model.

Componential Theories of Creativity
It is frequently assumed that human processes as complex and as 'personal' as creativity cannot be studied scientifically or captured in a theory. One approach to studying it has been to attempt to unpack what happens during creativity activity and to identify what things that people know, believe and do. The componential theories of creativity identify the aspects or components of individual activity that need to be in place for creative outcomes.

Thinking skills models of creativity
It is frequently argued that particular ways of thinking lead to creativity. Access to specific thinking skills allows the generation of creative outcomes. There are two aspects to these thinking skills; being able to think in particular ways and knowing the value of thinking in these ways, being able to decide when to think in these ways and to use the ways of thinking selectively.

The creativity process
In this section we will try to understand how an individual’s knowledge changes during the creativity
process.

Developmental trends in creativity
In this section we examine various aspects and characteristics of creativity and creative thinking, and how these aspects and features may gradually emerge.

Types of creativity tasks
In this section we examine four categories of creativity task; proactive and contributory
creativity, and responsive and expected creativity.

Assessing creativity.

This section examines a range of procedures used to assess creative thinking and production.

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