After Six Decades of Systematic Study of Creativity: What Do Teachers Need to Know About What It Is and How It Is Measured?

With creativity now being emphasized in schools, it is important for teachers to understand what it is and how it is measured. This review of the literature is an attempt to make sense of the many definitions and measures of creativity. As a result, this comprehensive review shows that most definitions agree that there are at least two criteria to judge whether a person or a product is creative or not, originality and usefulness. Organized according to Rhodes’s 3 P conceptualization of creativity—person, process, product, and press—more than 40 assessments used in creativity research were reviewed. Familiarity with the definitions, views of, and measurement of creativity can help teachers recognize and foster creativity in their students.     

The Grass Isn’t Always Greener: Perceptions of and Performance on Open-Note Exams

Undergraduate biology education is often viewed as being focused on memorization rather than development of students’ critical-thinking abilities. We speculated that open-note testing would be an easily implemented change that would emphasize higher-order thinking. As open-note testing is not commonly used in the biological sciences and the literature on its effects in biology education is sparse, we performed a comprehensive analysis of this intervention on a primary literature–based exam across three large-enrollment laboratory courses. Although students believed open-note testing would impact exam scores, we found no effect on performance, either overall or on questions of nearly all Bloom’s levels. Open-note testing also produced no advantage when examined under a variety of parameters, including research experience, grade point average, course grade, prior exposure to primary literature–focused laboratory courses, or gender. Interestingly, we did observe small differences in open- and closed-note exam performance and perception for students who experienced open-note exams for an entire quarter. This implies that student preparation or in-test behavior can be altered by exposure to open-note testing conditions in a single course and that ­increased experience may be necessary to truly understand the impact of this intervention.     

Is Creativity Masculine? Visual Arts College Students’ Perceptions of the Gender Stereotyping of Creativity and Its Influence on Creative Self-Efficacy

This study investigated visual arts college students’ perceptions of the gender stereotyping of creativity and the influence of this stereotyping on creative self-efficacy. The sample consisted of 1198 Chinese visual arts college students. The results showed that (a) both male and female students identified stereotypically masculine traits as more important to creativity than stereotypically feminine traits are, (b) male students demonstrated higher creative self-efficacy than their female counterparts did, and (c) students’ gender significantly moderated the effect of the gender stereotyping of creativity on creative self-efficacy. Specifically, the gender stereotyping of creativity had a positive effect on male students and a negative effect on female students. These findings revealed that gender stereotypes dominate concepts of creativity in Chinese art education and may hinder female students’ development of creative self-efficacy, resulting in gendered inequality in the visual arts field. The implications of these findings for visual arts education in China are discussed.     

Creativity in students’ modelling competencies: conceptualisation and measurement

Educational Studies in Mathematics - Modelling competencies are currently included in numerous curricula worldwide and are generally accepted as a complex, process-oriented construct. Therefore,...     

Cognitive Neuroscience and Educational Psychology: What Season Is It?

Byrnes and Fox get much right in their review of the relevance of cognitive neuroscience for educational psychology. They are correct that theoretical reduction is to be welcomed. They are also right that neurophysiological findings can constrain psychological theory and that this too is to be welcomed. Their review is on the mark in recommending that educational psychologists must become bilingual in their understanding of neurological terms and their analogous psychological constructs. The one difference in our positions that I do highlight is one of calibration rather than strong disagreement—my level of enthusiasm for scientific reduction in domains related to education is somewhat more muted than that of Byrnes and Fox because of wariness bom of the premature reductive attempts that litter our field.     

Learning and the pandemic: What’s next?

PROSPECTS - This article highlights key points with respect to each of the following: 1) School systems around the world were stagnant before Covid-19 and had been for some time; 2) Therefore there...     

Creativity: performativity’s poison or its antidote?

A common move in the study of creativity and performativity is to present the former as an antidote to the latter. Might we, therefore, see work on creativity in education as heralding an era of post-performativity? In this paper I argue that the portrayal of performativity in the literature on creativity presents an overly simplistic (vulgar?) understanding of what the former involves. In this literature, performativity is used to represent the tightening control over curriculum and pedagogy to meet externally imposed targets. Though this represents a ‘manifestation’ of performativity, it is not constitutive of it. During this paper, I contend that a vulgar or partial understanding of performativity is what leads writers to view creativity as its antidote. To demonstrate what is at stake here, I draw on Lyotard’s understanding of performativity. For Lyotard, performativity is a narrative in which effectiveness has usurped Enlightenment narratives of truth and justice and ultimately comes to shape our understanding of the world. During the paper, I try to show that the literature on creativity in education focuses on effectiveness, jettisons concerns with ‘truth’ and partakes in the nihilism of performativity.     

What Is Good?

“什么是真好?”我在沉思中问。法庭说:“法规。”学校说:“知识。”智者说:“真理。”愚人说:“欢乐。”少女说:“爱情。”侍者说:“美丽。”     

What Is Beauty?

It seems that beauty and women are twins. You are joking? No, I am not. Observe for yourself. Ads on fashion flood TV screens, radio programs, magazines, newspapers, and the streets. Whether they have realized or not, women are besieged by a sea of fashions. They are taught to think that without beautiful clothes they will grow old and lose their charm. So who dares to neglect dressing up at the cost of their appearance and youth?     

What Is Success?

What Is Success? To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty; To find the best in others; to lea…     

What Is Shyness?

People often talk as if shyness is a disease or mental condition that can be cured. I prefer to think of it as an emotional disability. It's something we are born with and something we carry with us in our entire life. There are too many people, however, …     

What Is Slang?

俚语已成为现代英语不可或缺的部分,遗憾的是人们对其缺乏认识,常将其和其相近的术语混在一起,本文拟就英语俚语定义的起源及沿革进行于简明论述,以飨读者.     

What Is It?

江西省赣州市的李欣同学给我们出了个小小的谜语。不看完她的文章,恐怕你还猜不出呢?     

What Is the Function of Mind and Brain?

Byrnes and Fox (1998) provide a useful and important overview of the ways in which cognitive neuroscientific research can inform educational research and practice, but leave unanswered the question: What is the function of mind and brain? An understanding of the function of mind and brain has implications for research in cognitive neuroscience and in educational psychology, and a number of these implications are spelled out in this comment.     

‘But What’s the Use? They Don’t Wear Breeches!’: Montaigne and the pedagogy of humor

Abstract

By virtue of his Essays Montaigne is rightly regarded not only as a radically modern philosopher but also as a transformative educational innovator. He confronted the extent to which pedantry and acculturation can justify cruelty by developing a conception of liberal arts education as the arts of liberation, and at the core of this education he placed the practice of essaying. This article argues that in easing us into essaying practices Montaigne qua educator makes reflexive use of three specific modes of didactic humor: incongruous comparison, subversive superiority, and leveling embodiment. Humor thus emerges as a cognitive disposition and communicative mode especially appropriate to the pedagogical engagement with difference today.     

‘New Labour,Old School Tie’: What Is Education For?

The Labour Party has been in power for the past 13 years in the UK. What is its legacy in education? What have been the salient aspects of its policy interventions, and what impact have these policies had on the practice of English teachers? With its assumption of a straightforward correlation between education and economic development, New Labour’s education policy needs to be seen primarily as a failure of politics – an abandonment of any commitment to social justice in pursuit of a standards agenda that reduces teachers to a condition of mere compliance and education to a set of commodities.     

What Is Benford's Law?

The surprising property of many data sets that their first significant digits follow Benford's Law provides examples that can pique and hold students’ interest. Several ideas for student activities are presented.