Creative potential in educational settings: its nature, measure, and nurture

Although creativity is considered one of the key ―21st century skills‖, this ability is still often misunderstood. Persistent conceptual and methodological barriers havelimited educational implications. This article reviews and discusses the three critical issues of ―nature‖, ―measure‖, and ―nurture‖ of creative potential in educational settings. A current perspective on the nature of creative potential is presented. In contrasts to a classic, but inaccurate ―g-factor view‖ of creativity, this perspective emphasizes a multidimensional and partly domain-specific view, upon which new assessment tools can be developed. Based on a more comprehensive evaluation of a child’s creative potential, educational programs tailored to a child’s strengths and weaknesses can be offered. These perspectives are discussed in light of current findings in the field. CREATIVE POTENTIAL IN EDUCATIONAL SETTINGS 3 Creative Potential in Educational Settings: its Nature, Measure, and Nurture Creativity is increasingly recognized as a valuable asset for individuals in their daily problem solving and their professional careers, that contributes to personal and societal development (Besançon, Lubart, & Barbot, 2013; Lubart, Zenasni, & Barbot, 2013). As one of the four key ―21st century skills‖ (together with critical thinking, collaboration, and communication), creativity has received increasing attention in the fields of psychology and education since the 1950’s. Despite over half a century of systematic research on this topic, this ability is still incompletely understood. As a result, developing children’s creativity in educational settings is a complex endeavor. First, it requires that the nature of the construct of creativity be consensually understood by psychologists, educators, teachers, and the scientific community. Second, it supposes that instruments measuring accurately this construct in children be available. Third, interpretations made from creativity test scores should lead to informed decision in terms of orientation, and accurate implementation of creativity learning in the classroom. This article reviews anddiscusses these three major issues of nature, measure, and nurture in terms of implications in educational settings. The Nature of Creative Potential In the fields of Education and Psychology, creativity is often defined as the ability to produce original and valuable work that fits within particular task or domain constraints (Runco & Jaeger, 2012; Stein, 1953; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). Compared to classical intelligence focusing on analytic ability, knowledge, and expert resolution of common problems with defined solutions, creativity concerns generating new, previously unknown ideas and behaviors in novel situations or treating familiar situations in new ways (Sternberg, 1985). Another important CREATIVE POTENTIAL IN EDUCATIONAL SETTINGS 4 distinction between creativity and intelligence is that contrary to general intelligence (operationalized by the g-factor or IQ), creativity does not represent a unitaryentity (Barbot & Tinio, in press). If individual differences exist in the outcomes of one’s ―potential‖ for creativity, much evidence in the field has pointed to the multifaceted and partly domain-specific nature of creativity: Multifaceted, because a large set of resources come into play in creative work, and the resources needed and their combination may vary according to the specific demands of a particular creative work; Domain-specific, because most people have only a limited set of resources that ―fits‖ the optimal set and combinations of skills required in a given creative outlet, and it is therefore not likely that a person will show achievements across multiple creative tasks. Hence, to understand the nature of creativity, it is first useful to distinguish between creative potential, creative accomplishment, and creative talent (Barbot & Lubart, 2012a; Besançon et al., 2013). Creative potential is a latent ability to produce original, adaptive work, which is part of an individual’s ―human capital‖ (Walberg, 1988). It results from a person’s unique combination of resources coming into play in creative work, including aspects of motivation, cognition, and personality(Lubart, 1999; Lubart et al., 2013; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). Specifically, this unique combination results in multiple potentials for creativity (ranging from low to high potential) depending on its fit between one’s resources and the various creative tasks demands (e.g., Lubart et al., 2013). Importantly, a person’s potential may lead to achievement if that person has the opportunity to do so. Whereas intellectual ability often results in academic success, creative potential is best accomplished in original and unique outputs, recognized as valuable in a domain-based context. Therefore, creative achievement refers to the actual production of a creative output that has been recognized as creative by some audience. Finally, creative talent refers to the tendency to produce creative work on repeated CREATIVE POTENTIAL IN EDUCATIONAL SETTINGS 5 occasions(Besançon et al., 2013).Given that exceptional contributions of child prodigy are extremely rare, most teachers, educators, and advisers who are interested in ―creativity‖ in primary and middle schooling-age are in fact most often interested in the construct of ―creative potential‖ rather than to creative achievement or creative talent. According to componential approaches to creativity, creative potential reflects the confluence of several distinct, but interrelated resources(Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). Person-level resources include biological and genetic factors (Barbot, Tan, & Grigorenko, 2013; Kaufman, Kornilov, Bristol, Tan, & Grigorenko, 2010), aspects of cognitionsuch as divergent thinking (Guilford, 1950); or metaphorical thinking (Tan, Barbot, Mourgues&Grigorenko2013), and aspects of conation (personality, motivational and emotional factors) such as the willingness to take risks and be open to new ideas and experiences, while tolerating ambiguous situations and stimuli (Besançon et al., 2013). Other person-level resources include task-relevant knowledge that are necessary in each specific content area such as creative writing (Barbot, Tan, Randi, Santa-Donato, & Grigorenko, 2012), musical composition (Barbot & Lubart, 2012b), or managerial creativity (Caroff & Lubart, 2012). Finally, environmental-level resources refer to aspects of culture, time and place (physical and/or socio-environmental settings; e.g.,Barbot & Tinio, in press). The presence of each of these resources and their particular combinationwithin each person explain the individual differences in creative potential across domains and tasks (Lubart, 1999; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). Indeed, a person’s creative potential for a given domain or task varies according to the nature and combination of the resources needed in that particular outlet (Barbot & Tinio, in press; Lubart et al., 2013). As an illustration, a child may show high potential in poetry composition, average potential in creative fiction composition, and low potential in CREATIVE POTENTIAL IN EDUCATIONAL SETTINGS 6 musical composition. This heterogeneity is expectedbecause these creative outlets involve a somewhat specific set of resources (not only task-relevant knowledge): for example, associative and metaphorical thinking might be crucial resources for poetry composition, whereas perseverance and imagination might be the most important resources for writing creative fiction (Barbot et al., 2012; Barbot et al., 2013; Barbot & Tinio, in press; Tan et al., 2012). Hence, the different nature of these creative outlets entails a different set of person-level resources that must come into play in a particular way to lead to high creativity outcomes. Extending this idea, the child showing high potential in poetry composition may also show a high potential inslam poetry because these outletsbuild upon a very similar set of resources.In other words, individuals show similar levels of creative potential in outlets that are highly similar. The exte