Volume 9 (2022): Edition 1 (June 2022)

The Knowledge Society has highlighted the importance of creativity as a goal competence, which should be fostered in higher education institutions; therefore, it is necessary to integrate innovative educational experiences oriented to the development of creativity complementing the professional training of students. Recent research from psychology and pedagogy reports advances associated with the nature, evaluation, composition, and conditions for teaching creativity that have resulted in successful applications in only one facet of the creative process. In this research, we propose an integrated model for making educational interventions through online courses. This model combines contributions to the teaching of creativity from pedagogy in relation to the pedagogical model, instructional design, and conditions of the teaching-learning process required for the promotion of creativity. It also includes the contributions of psychology in relation to the cognitive processes and skills associated with creativity, the techniques and activities for the development of creative skills, as well as the principles associated with intrinsic motivation based on the theory of self-determination through its application in the learning technique called gamification. The advantage of this integrated model is that it incorporates and fosters multiple components of creativity simultaneously, with the objective of generating creative results of greater breadth and quality.

Rationale: Creativity assessment can be influenced by rater characteristics, including social group membership, such as gender. As raters are often male, the gender composition of rater panels in the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) could introduce unintended implicit biases into this measurement methodology. The present study analyzed such biases by examining gender differences in creativity assessment.

Method: We applied the CAT and asked male (n = 26) and female (n = 39) judges to rate the creativity of fashion outfits presented on Instagram. We then examined gender differences in mean creativity ratings and rater consistency (inter-rater reliability). In an additional qualitative analysis, we analyzed implicit theories of creativity of female and male raters by comparing the criteria that these raters applied when assessing creativity.

Results: We found no systematic support for gender differences in the level of creativity ratings, but observed that rating consistency was significantly higher for female than for male judges. Additional content analysis suggested that female and male raters attached different relative importance to various assessment criteria, indicating gender differences in rating criteria.

Discussion: Our study suggests that rater panel composition can indeed affect aspects of creativity assessment, although we do not obtain strong support for a gender-related bias in the CAT methodology.

The study was conducted on science learners at high school- and college-level to explore the interrelation of various factors from social environment, cognitive, and non-cognitive resources affecting their creative potential. A hierarchical regression method was used to determine how well positive behavior of parents, supportive behavior of friend groups, grit, motivation in science, and legislative thinking style could predict the creative potential of the science learners. The results revealed that supportive friend group behavior, consistency of interest (a sub-factor of grit), and legislative thinking style can predict the creative potential of science learners. Group variance explained by them was at over 53%. Legislative thinking style turned out to be the most dominant predictor, with 63% of unique variance explained by it. Positive friend group behavior came second, with 9% unique variance explained to the residual. Finally, consistency of interest could explain 12% of unique variance but with negative sign, implying it was not a component of the creative potential of science learners.

Given the wide diversity of conceptions of creativity, this study analyzes ten Ibero-American early childhood education curricula with the aim of finding out what concept, approach, and teaching methodology they propose for creativity. The research addresses two questions: what is the implicit or explicit notion of creativity held by the Early Childhood curricula, and what methodological recommendations are included to foster creativity in the classroom? The study used qualitative methodology, specifically content analysis completed with expert judgement. Results showed the importance of creativity in the curricula analyzed and highlighted not only the need to clarify the term at a conceptual level, but also to examine in depth the teaching and learning methodologies used. In conclusion, the study urges to strengthen artistic training in both initial and continuing education studies.

In Hong Kong, the Education Bureau (EDB) regularly assesses the quality of services provided by publicly subsidized kindergartens to children aged 3 to 6. Quality Review (QR) reports are written by government officials and published on the EDB’s website. This study analyzes the feedback pertaining to Arts and Creativity to better understand the role this learning area plays in Hong Kong kindergartens. Lexical and content analyses were applied on 164 QR reports published between 2017 and 2020. Findings showed that: (1) the role of Arts and Creativity in the QR reports is relatively minor, which suggests that this learning area is somewhat secondary in Hong Kong kindergartens; (2) presence of the various art forms differs significantly, with Music and Visual Arts being more frequent than Drama and especially Dance; and (3) classroom activities seem to be teacher-centered, product-oriented, and reproductive. Findings suggest that the Arts and Creativity pedagogies enacted in Hong Kong kindergartens are not fully consistent with the official kindergarten Curriculum Guide, which draws on a Western conceptualization of creativity in the arts. We argue that this curriculum/practice gap reveals the need for local stakeholders to embrace a “glocalization” paradigm. Limitations, future research, and implications are discussed.

Creativity has long been central in multimodal writing. Unlike traditional writing, which uses text alone, multimodal writing relies on the use of a combination of modes to convey meaning such as text, speech, images, audio, gesture, and space. Scholars of multimodal writing stressed that using multiple modes allows for greater creativity and newness. Recently, however, scholars have questioned whether creativity is so straightforward in students’ multimodal writing. Students may resist producing new types of writing. Their creativity outcome is dependent upon their preferences and their goals in the writing assignment. This article examines students’ choices when given the freedom to compose in any mode and their perceptions of their multimodal writing experience in comparison with traditional essay writing. Drawing on data from students’ multimodal products, surveys, and interviews we show how students simply used available resources in their multimodal composing and how creativity was negotiated. Although they identified several affordances for multimodal writing and described it as more interesting than conventional essay writing, they seemed to resist incorporating a variety of semiotic resources into their projects because their goal was to showcase their writing skills. We argue that developing explicit knowledge about various modes helps improve students’ understanding of multimodal writing as creative design.

An original way to make sense of the aesthetic experience concept – in a Deweyan perspective – is from the Art-Education binomial. After studying the pragmatist philosophical category of Experience in John Dewey, a product of Doctoral theoretical research in education, it was possible to characterize a new art movement: School Art. Hence, this conceptual-theoretical finding will expand a wide range of art movements that emerged between the nineteenth century and contemporaneity: Art Nouveau, Impressionism, Abstract Art, Futurism, Action Painting, and Children’s Art, among many others. However, because of lexical reasons and hoping to achieve greater acceptance among theorists, the so-called School Art will patent from this paper as a neologism named from now on as Artscholarism. Thus, its philosophical-historical foundations, characteristics, and description will be the article’s primary purpose. In that sense, psychological and historical discussions will emerge throughout the paper. In conclusion, the new art movement – Artscholarism – comes from Deweyan thinking and is framed by creativity and a social context.

In the interview with Sandra Russ, one of most prolific creativity researchers, we discuss her career, main areas of research interest, chosen research methods and share her thoughts about the future of research on creativity and effectiveness in scientific work.