Studies: Creativity can be taught! Research reveals ways

Study about the way how people respond to the tasks of creative thinking.

We found that the usual tips for focusing brainstorming sessions on numbers rather than the quality of ideas do not work for everyone.

These results indicate the need to re-evaluate ways to learn creative thinking.

Two studies were conducted where participants were asked to perform creative thinking tasks.

In the first study, college students were given two classic problems, finding different uses for a brick and a knife.

Their responses were assessed for the total number of ideas they generated and the originality of these ideas.

Ideas considered original move away from the usual use of the object, e.g. a brick as a building material. A more original answer might be to use a brick to mince the garlic.

In the second study, high school students were asked to think of different ways they could improve their schools.

This is a less abstract question and something that students are personally touched on.

Again, the responses were rated for the total number of ideas and their originality. The most common ideas were for starters later, while one of the original ideas suggested that teachers have YouTube channels where students could review lessons while studying.

It has long been known that there is a tendency for those who have more ideas to come up with even more original ones.

In other words, the quantity and quality of ideas tend to be similar. Our question was whether this is necessarily the case for everyone.

Both studies found that some people come up with a lot of ideas but they are not very creative, others come up with average ideas in number and creativity and some come up with not a lot of ideas but what they have is creative.

Indeed, many idea-generating stars tend to think only of mediocre creative ideas. People who thought about most creative ideas had either just slightly above average number of ideas or even slightly below average number of ideas.

Emphasizing the quantity of ideas will not necessarily stimulate or teach the successful generation of creative ideas.

What are the alternative ways of growing and teaching creativity?

Most programs focus on strategies and techniques to help generate ideas. However, creativity is not just about thinking, it is also full of emotion – from the excitement of inspiration to the disappointment of inevitable setbacks to the mix of fear and excitement when presenting a work to the ‘world’.

Another recent study from the lab at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, i published in “Empirical Studies in Arts “, shows that children successfully learn creativity skills in a program that focuses on the emotions and skills of intelligence emotional.

Instruction is made using art. Because art is both creative and conveys emotions, it can be an effective tool for learning emotional intelligence and creativity skills.

The course included six 75-minute sessions that included art observation and art making. The children explored the exhibits at the art center to deepen their ability to identify and understand the nuances of emotion, followed by the creation of art.

The central aspect of creativity training was problem solving. This aspect of the creative process was identified in a classic study by Csikszentmihalyi and Getzels in 1971 in which they set up an art studio in their laboratory at the University of Chicago and invited art students to create drawings of quiet life choosing from 30 facilities available.

Artists varied in how much time they spent getting objects, feeling their weight and structure, or trying to work mechanical parts of objects.

This process of exploring and playing before engaging in a specific idea and course of action, which objects to choose, and how to portray them, was called finding the problem. Artists who spent more time finding problems made the most creative drawings.

In teaching creativity skills, instead of immediately immersing themselves in creating art, children were asked to play with materials – to feel their textures, to try them out, to arrange them and to reorganize them.

Children were encouraged to use emotion-laden memories to explore art ideas that portray different emotional themes – HAPPINESS , sadness, Outrage , fear, and serenity.

For example, how does anger feel? What colors or textures can be associated with anger? What situations have angered the children? The children were asked to come up with numerous ideas before starting their artwork. The concluding discussions at the end of each session focused on how emotional intelligence and creativity skills could be applied in everyday life, whether you are thinking of a creative birthday gift for a friend or writing a class essay.

To test what the children learned in the course, an experimental group, children in training was compared with a control group, children not in training in tests of generating creative ideas and finding problems. All tests required children to apply what they learned in the course to different problems.

After the training, the children were able to reformulate everyday problems eg, “You are working on a project with a group and one person is not doing any work” and they were able to come up with more ideas and ideas more original. for unusual uses for everyday objects e.g., how to creatively use a newspaper or a button.

The children were tested again two months after completing the training. Unfortunately, not everything they learned was preserved, similar to the loss of learning over the summer about academic skills. After the course, when children do not continue to practice their creative skills at school or in extracurricular activities, knowledge is disseminated. Creativity is a muscle; must be exercised to maintain and grow. This suggests that the teaching of creative skills should be included in the prevailing school curricula.

In another study, published in Journal of Creative Behavior,it was shown that an art-based course, focused on emotions and emotional intelligence skills, can also successfully teach creative skills to professional adults.

The eight-session course was built on art observation. Instead of the typical 30 seconds in front of a work of art, which is average for a museum visitor, participants were asked to observe it for 20 minutes and focus on identifying and understanding the emotions described in the art.

Jumpstarting Creativity

Learning that emotions convey information about one’s environment by observing art can be applied to everyday situations. Feelings of confusion, for example, tell us that we need more information.

A participant may find an abstract sculpture confusing. Instead of walking beside her, they were challenged to take care of this feeling and relate it to their daily experiences. They may associate the confusion in front of a sculpture with their own confusion in workshops when they do not ask explanatory questions for fear of a negative reaction from colleagues.

Attention to emotions helps to identify a real life problem, to benefit as much as possible from work meetings, as well as to provide input towards creative solutions.

After the course, participants were better able to generate original ideas. Moreover, the skills were retained two months later. Professional adults have more autonomy in structuring their daily activities and more opportunities to continue practicing the skills learned.

What are the latest scholarship lessons about teaching creativity? If we learn that the number of ideas should be the focus of the brainstorming of ideas, we will not necessarily end up with the most creative ideas. An alternative is to learn creativity by enhancing emotional intelligence skills and exploring how to use emotions for problem solving and creation management.

Everyday innovators are masters of using emotions to identify problems that are worth solving. Aproova Mehta did not like everything about grocery shopping; he used these feelings as an impetus to create Instacart and solve the grocery shopping problem for himself and thousands of others. Tristan Walker was frustrated by the lack of shaving products for thick or curly hair. The razor-sharp awakening frustration was an inspiration to create a line of beauty products that creatively solved the problem neglected by the industry of the day.

Creativity training programs can learn from them and purposefully include learning emotional intelligence skills.

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