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Creative Thinking in the ClassroomRobert J. Sternberg aa PACE Center , Yale University , Box 208358, New Haven, CT,06520-8358, USAPublished online: 25 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Robert J. Sternberg (2003) Creative Thinking in the Classroom, ScandinavianJournal of Educational Research, 47:3, 325-338, DOI: 10.1080/00313830308595

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Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research,Vol. 47, No. 3, 2003

Creative Thinking in the ClassroomROBERT J. STERNBERGPACE Center, Yale University, Box 208358, New Haven, CT 06520–8358, USA

ABSTRACT Schools generally undervalue creativity. Perhaps teachers think creativity is nodifferent from general intelligence or that schooling cannot or should not value creativity, orperhaps they do not know how to teach for creativity. This essay first argues that creativity isdifferent from general intelligence; second, that teaching in a way that encourages and rewardscreativity can improve school performance; and third, that children can learn to make certainkinds of decisions that will enhance their creativity. Creativity can be of different kinds and itis important that teachers reward all kinds of creativity.

Key words: creativity; intelligence; investment theory of creativity; propulsion theory ofkinds of creative contributions

INTRODUCTION

Are children who are high in ‘general intelligence’ the same ones who are high increativity? If not, can teaching in a way that is responsive to children’s creativityimprove the achievement of creative children who might otherwise be viewed as notvery ‘smart’ or even as ‘behaviour problems’? And if teaching for creativity can besuccessful, exactly what form does it take? These are the kinds of questions weaddress in our research.

The general notion motivating our work is that children can be intelligent in avariety of ways but that schools tend primarily to value only a single way of beingintelligent. According to the theory of successful intelligence, intelligence comprisesanalytical, creative and practical abilities (Sternberg, 1985, 1997, 1999c). Schools,however, tend primarily to value memory and analytical skills, but creative andpractical skills are at least as important to success in life as are memory andanalytical skills, and may even be more important, especially after formal schoolingends. If so, then we ought to be nurturing and rewarding rather than ignoring oreven punishing students who are high in creative or practical skills.

So let us consider the three questions raised above. First, are creative skillsdistinct from other kinds of intellectual skills? Second, if so, can teaching in a waythat nurtures and rewards creativity result in improved academic performance?Third, exactly what form does such teaching take?

Creative thinking will be defined here as thinking that is novel and that

ISSN 0031-3831 print; ISSN 1430-1170 online/03/030325-14 2003 Scandinavian Journal of Educational ResearchDOI: 10.1080/0031383032000079281

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produces ideas that are of value (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995, 1996; see also essays inSternberg, 1999a).

THE RELATION OF CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE TO ANALYTICAL ANDPRACTICAL INTELLIGENCE

An important foundation of the theory of successful intelligence is the importance ofanalytical, creative and practical abilities to intellectual functioning. A number of thestudies described below show both the internal validity and external validity of theseconstructs.

Measures of Successful Intelligence, in General

Many of our studies have examined creative thinking in the context of analyticalthinking (as measured by tests of intelligence and similar tests) and of practicalthinking as well. We have examined both the internal validity and external validityof our measures.

Internal validity. Three separate factor-analytic studies support the internal validityof the theory of successful intelligence.

In one study (Sternberg et al., 1999), we used the so-called Sternberg TriarchicAbilities Test (STAT) (Sternberg, 1993) to investigate the internal validity of thetheory. Three hundred and twenty-six high school students, primarily from diverseparts of the USA, took the test, which comprised 12 subtests in all. There were foursubtests each measuring analytical, creative and practical abilities. For each type ofability, there were three multiple choice tests and one essay test. The multiple choicetests, in turn, involved, respectively, verbal, quantitative and figural content. Con-sider the content of each test.

1. Analytical–verbal. Figuring out meanings of neologisms (artificial words)from natural contexts. Students see a novel word embedded in a paragraphand have to infer its meaning from the context.

2. Analytical–quantitative. Number series. Students have to say what numbershould come next in a series of numbers.

3. Analytical–figural. Matrices. Students see a figural matrix with the lowerright entry missing. They have to say which of the options fits into themissing space.

4. Practical–verbal. Everyday reasoning. Students are presented with a set ofeveryday problems in the life of an adolescent and have to select the optionthat best solves each problem.

5. Practical–quantitative. Everyday mathematics. Students are presented withscenarios requiring the use of mathematics in everyday life (e.g. buyingtickets for a ballgame) and have to solve mathematical problems based onthe scenarios.

6. Practical–figural. Route planning. Students are presented with a map of an

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area (e.g. an entertainment park) and have to answer questions aboutnavigating effectively through the area depicted by the map.

7. Creative–verbal. Novel analogies. Students are presented with verbal anal-ogies preceded by counterfactual premises (e.g. money falls off trees). Theyhave to solve the analogies as though the counterfactual premises were true.

8. Creative–quantitative. Novel number operations. Students are presentedwith rules for novel number operations, for example ‘flix’, which involvesnumerical manipulations that differ as a function of whether the first of twooperands is greater than, equal to or less than the second. Participants haveto use the novel number operations to solve presented mathematical prob-lems.

9. Creative–figural. In each item, participants are first presented with a figuralseries that involves one or more transformations. They then have to applythe rule of the series to a new figure with a different appearance andcomplete the new series.

We found that a confirmatory factor analysis on the data was supportive of thetriarchic theory of human intelligence, yielding separate and uncorrelated analytical,creative and practical factors. The lack of correlation was due to the inclusion ofessay as well as multiple choice subtests. Although multiple choice tests tended tocorrelate substantially with multiple choice tests, their correlations with essay testswere much weaker. We found the multiple choice analytical subtest to load mosthighly on the analytical factor, but the essay creative and performance subtests toload most highly on their respective factors. Thus, measurement of creative andpractical abilities should probably ideally be accomplished with other kinds of testinginstruments that complement multiple choice instruments.

We have now developed a revised version of this test, which, in a preliminarystudy of 53 college students, shows outstanding internal and external validationproperties (Grigorenko et al., 2000). This test supplements the creative and practicalmeasures described above with performance-based measures. For example, creativeabilities are additionally measured by having people write and tell short stories, byhaving them do captions for cartoons and by having them use computer software todesign a variety of products. Practical skills are measured additionally by aneveryday situational judgment inventory and a college student tacit knowledgeinventory. These tests require individuals to make decisions about everyday prob-lems faced in life and in school. We found that the creative tests are moderatelycorrelated with each other and the practical tests are highly correlated with eachother. The two kinds of tests are distinct from one another, however. Interestingly,the performance-based assessments tend to cluster separately from multiple choiceassessments measuring the same skills (similar to our earlier findings of essaymeasures tending to be distinctive from multiple choice measures). These resultsfurther suggest the need for measuring not only a variety of abilities, but also formeasuring these abilities through various modalities of testing.

In a second and separate study, conducted with 240 freshman year high schoolstudents in the USA, Finland and Spain, we used the multiple choice section of

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the STAT to compare five alternative models of intelligence, again via confirmatoryfactor analysis. A model featuring a general factor of intelligence fitted the datarelatively poorly. The triarchic model, allowing for intercorrelation among theanalytical, creative and practical factors, provided the best fit to the data (Sternberget al., 2001a).

In a third study, we tested 511 Russian school children (ranging in age from 8to 17 years) as well as 490 mothers and 328 fathers of these children (Grigorenko& Sternberg, 2001). We used entirely distinct measures of analytical, creative andpractical intelligence. Consider, for example, the tests we used for adults. Similartests were used for children.

Fluid analytical intelligence was measured by two subtests of a test of non-verbal intelligence. The Test of g: Culture Fair, Level II (Cattell & Cattell, 1973) isa test of fluid intelligence designed to reduce, as much as possible, the influence ofverbal comprehension, culture and educational level, although no test eliminatessuch influences. In the first subtest we used, Series, individuals were presented withan incomplete, progressive series of figures. The participants’ task was to select,from among the choices provided, the answer that best continued the series. In theMatrices subtest, the task was to complete the matrix presented at the left of eachrow.

The test of crystallised intelligence was adapted from existing traditional tests ofanalogies and synonyms/antonyms used in Russia. We used adaptations of Russianrather than American tests because the vocabulary used in Russia differs from thatused in the USA. The first part of the test included 20 verbal analogies(KR20 � 0.83). An example is circle–ball � square–? (a) quadrangular, (b) figure, (c)rectangular, (d) solid, (e) cube. The second part included 30 pairs of words and theparticipants’ task was to specify whether the words in the pair were synonyms orantonyms (KR20 � 0.74). Examples are latent–hidden and systematic–chaotic.

The measure of creative intelligence also comprised two parts. The first partasked the participants to describe the world through the eyes of insects. The secondpart asked participants to describe who might live and what might happen on aplanet called ‘Priumliava’. No additional information on the nature of the planet wasspecified. Each part of the test was scored in three different ways to yield threedifferent scores. The first score was for originality (novelty); the second was for theamount of development in the plot (quality); the third was for creative use of priorknowledge in these relatively novel kinds of tasks (sophistication). The meaninter-story reliabilities were 0.69, 0.75 and 0.75 for the three respective scores, all ofwhich were statistically significant at the P � 0.001 level.

The measure of practical intelligence was self-report and also comprised twoparts. The first part was designed as a 20 item self-report instrument, assessingpractical skills in the social domain (e.g. effective and successful communicationwith other people), in the family domain (e.g. how to fix household items, how torun the family budget) and in the domain of effective resolution of sudden problems(e.g. organising something that has become chaotic). For the subscales, internalconsistency estimates varied from 0.50 to 0.77. In this study, only the total practicalintelligence self-report scale was used (Cronbach’s � � 0.71). The second part had

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four vignettes, based on themes that appeared in popular Russian magazines in thecontext of discussion of adaptive skills in the current society. The four themes were,respectively, how to maintain the value of one’s savings, what to do when one makesa purchase and discovers that the item one has purchased is broken, how to locatemedical assistance in a time of need and how to manage a salary bonus one hasreceived for outstanding work. Each vignette was accompanied by five choices andparticipants had to select the best one. Obviously, there is no one ‘right’ answer inthis type of situation. Hence we used the most frequently chosen response as thekeyed answer. To the extent that this response was suboptimal, this suboptimalitywould work against us in subsequent analyses relating scores on this test to otherpredictor and criterion measures.

In this study, exploratory principal component analysis for both children andadults yielded very similar factor structures. Both varimax and oblimin rotationsyielded clear-cut analytical, creative and practical factors for the tests. Thus, asample of a different nationality (Russian) with a different set of tests and a differentmethod of analysis (exploratory rather than confirmatory analysis) again supportedthe theory of successful intelligence. Creative ability, in particular, seems to be atleast somewhat distinct from analytical and practical abilities.

External validity. We have done three studies that look simultaneously at theexternal validity of analytical, creative and practical abilities.

In the first set of studies, we explored the question of whether conventionaleducation in school systematically discriminates against children with creative andpractical strengths (Sternberg & Clinkenbeard, 1995; Sternberg et al., 1996, 1999).Motivating this work was the belief that the systems in schools strongly tend tofavour children with strengths in memory and analytical abilities.

We used the STAT as described above. The test was administered to 326children around the USA and in some other countries who were identified by theirschools as gifted by any standard whatsoever. Children were selected for a summerprogramme in (college level) psychology if they fell into one of five ability groupings:high analytical, high creative, high practical, high balanced (high in all three abilities)or low balanced (low in all three abilities). Students who came to Yale were thendivided into four instructional groups. Students in all four instructional groups usedthe same introductory psychology textbook (a preliminary version of Sternberg,1995) and listened to the same psychology lectures. What differed among them wasthe type of afternoon discussion section to which they were assigned. They wereassigned to an instructional condition that emphasised either memory, analytical,creative or practical instruction. For example, in the memory condition they mightbe asked to describe the main tenets of a major theory of depression. In theanalytical condition they might be asked to compare and contrast two theories ofdepression. In the creative condition they might be asked to formulate their owntheory of depression. In the practical condition, they might be asked how they coulduse what they had learned about depression to help a friend who was depressed.

Students in all four instructional conditions were evaluated in terms of theirperformance on homework, a mid-term exam, a final exam and an independent

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project. Each type of work was evaluated for memory, analytical, creative andpractical quality. Thus, all students were evaluated in exactly the same way.

Our results suggested the utility of the theory of successful intelligence. First,we observed when the students arrived at Yale that the students in the high creativeand high practical groups were much more diverse in terms of racial, ethnic,socio-economic and educational backgrounds than were the students in the highanalytical group, suggesting that correlations of measured intelligence with statusvariables such as these may be reduced by using a broader conception of intelli-gence. Thus, the kinds of students identified as strong differed in terms of popula-tions from which they were drawn in comparison with students identified as strongsolely by analytical measures. More importantly, just by expanding the range ofabilities we measured, we discovered intellectual strengths that might not have beenapparent through a conventional test.

We found that all three ability tests (analytical, creative and practical)significantly predicted course performance. When multiple regression analysis wasused, at least two of these ability measures contributed significantly to the predictionof each of the measures of achievement. Perhaps as a reflection of the difficulty ofde-emphasising the analytical way of teaching, one of the significant predictors wasalways the analytical score. (However, in a replication of our study with low incomeAfrican-American students from New York, Deborah Coates of the City Universityof New York found a different pattern of results. Her data indicated that thepractical tests were better predictors of course performance than were the analyticalmeasures, suggesting that what ability test predicts what criterion depends onpopulation as well as mode of teaching.) Most importantly, there was an aptitude–treatment interaction whereby students who were placed in instructional conditionsthat better matched their pattern of abilities out-performed students who weremismatched. In other words, when students are taught in a way that fits how theythink, they do better in school. Children with creative and practical abilities, who arealmost never taught or assessed in a way that matches their pattern of abilities, maybe at a disadvantage in course after course, year after year.

In a follow-up study (Sternberg et al., 1998a,b), we looked at learning of socialstudies and science by third graders and eighth graders. The 225 third graders werestudents in a very low income neighbourhood in Raleigh, NC. The 142 eighthgraders were students who were largely middle to upper middle class studying inBaltimore, MD, and Fresno, CA. In this study students were assigned to one ofthree instructional conditions. In the first condition, they were taught the course thatbasically they would have learned had we not intervened. The emphasis in thecourse was on memory. In a second condition they were taught in a way thatemphasised critical (analytical) thinking. In the third condition they were taught ina way that emphasised analytical, creative and practical thinking. All students’performance was assessed for memory learning (through multiple choice assess-ments) as well as for analytical, creative and practical learning (through performanceassessments).

As expected, we found that students in the successful intelligence (analytical,creative, practical) condition outperformed the other students in terms of the

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performance assessments. One could argue that this result merely reflected the waythey were taught. Nevertheless, the result suggested that teaching for these kinds ofthinking succeeded. More important, however, was the result that children in thesuccessful intelligence condition out-performed the other children even on themultiple choice memory tests. In other words, to the extent that one’s goal is just tomaximise children’s memory for information, teaching for successful intelligence isstill superior. It enables children to capitalise on their strengths and to correct or tocompensate for their weaknesses and it allows children to encode material in avariety of interesting ways.

We have now extended these results to reading curricula at the middle schooland the high school level. In a study of 871 middle school students and 432 highschool students we taught reading either triarchically or through the regular curricu-lum. At the middle school level reading was taught explicitly. At the high schoollevel reading was infused into instruction in mathematics, physical sciences, socialsciences, English, history, foreign languages and the arts. In all settings students whowere taught triarchially substantially out-performed students who were taught instandard ways (Grigorenko et al., 2002).

In the third study, the Grigorenko & Sternberg (2001) study described above,the analytical, creative and practical tests we employed were used to predict mentaland physical health among the Russian adults. Mental health was measured bywidely used paper and pencil tests of depression and anxiety and physical health wasmeasured by self-report. The best predictor of mental and physical health was thepractical intelligence measure. Analytical intelligence came second and creativeintelligence came third. All three contributed to prediction, however. Thus, we againconcluded that a theory of intelligence encompassing all three elements providesbetter prediction of success in life than does a theory comprising just the analyticalelement.

Thus the results of three sets of studies suggest that the theory of successfulintelligence is valid as a whole. Moreover, the results suggest that the theory canmake a difference not only in laboratory tests, but in school classrooms and even theeveryday life of adults as well. Consider further measures of creative intelligence, inparticular.

Measures of Creative Intelligence, in Particular

Intelligence tests contain a range of problems, some of them more novel than others.In some of our work we have shown that when one goes beyond the range ofunconventionality of the tests, one starts to tap sources of individual differencesmeasured little or not at all by the tests. According to the theory of successfulintelligence, (creative) intelligence is particularly well measured by problems assess-ing how well an individual can cope with relative novelty. Thus it is important toinclude in a battery of tests problems that are relatively novel in nature. Theseproblems can be either convergent or divergent in nature.

In work with convergent problems, we presented 80 individuals with novelkinds of reasoning problems that had a single best answer. For example, they might

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be told that some objects are green and others blue, but still other objects might begrue, meaning green until the year 2000 and blue thereafter, or bleen, meaning blueuntil the year 2000 and green thereafter. Or they might be told of four kinds ofpeople on the planet Kyron: blens, who are born young and die young; kwefs, whoare born old and die old; balts, who are born young and die old; prosses, who areborn old and die young (Sternberg, 1982; Tetewsky & Sternberg, 1986). Their taskwas to predict future states from past states, given incomplete information. Inanother set of studies, 60 people were given more conventional kinds of inductivereasoning problems, such as analogies, series completions and classifications, butwere told to solve them. However, the problems had premises preceding them thatwere either conventional (dancers wear shoes) or novel (dancers eat shoes). Theparticipants had to solve the problems as though the counterfactuals were true(Sternberg & Gastel, 1989a,b).

In these studies we found that correlations with conventional kinds of testsdepended on how novel or non-entrenched the conventional tests were. The morenovel the items, the higher the correlations of our tests with scores on successivelymore novel conventional tests. Thus, the components isolated for relatively novelitems would tend to correlate more highly with more unusual tests of fluid abilities(see, for example, Cattell & Cattell, 1973) than with tests of crystallised abilities. Wealso found that when response times on the relatively novel problems were compo-nentially analysed, some components better measured the creative aspect of intelli-gence than did others. For example, in the ‘grue–bleen’ task mentioned above, theinformation processing component requiring people to switch from conventionalgreen–blue thinking to grue–bleen thinking and then back to green-blue thinkingagain was a particularly good measure of the ability to cope with novelty.

In work with divergent reasoning problems having no one best answer, we asked63 people to create various kinds of products (Lubart & Sternberg, 1995; Sternberg& Lubart, 1991, 1995, 1996) where an infinite variety of responses were possible.Individuals were asked to create products in the realms of writing, art, advertisingand science. In writing, they would be asked to write very short stories for which wewould give them a choice of titles, such as ‘Beyond the Edge’ or ‘The Octopus’sSneakers’. In art, they were asked to produce art compositions with titles such as‘The Beginning of Time’ or ‘Earth from an Insect’s Point of View’. In advertising,they were asked to produce advertisements for products such as a brand of bow tieor a brand of door knob. In science, they were asked to solve problems such as oneasking them how people might detect extraterrestrial aliens among us who areseeking to escape detection. Participants created two products in each domain.

We found that creativity is relatively although not wholly domain specific.Correlations of ratings of the creative quality of the products across domains werelower than correlations of ratings and generally were at about the 0.4 level. Thus,there was some degree of relation across domains, at the same time that there wasplenty of room for someone to be strong in one or more domains but not in others.More importantly, perhaps, we found, as we had for the convergent problems, arange of correlations with conventional tests of abilities. As was the case for thecorrelations obtained with convergent problems, correlations were higher to the

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extent that problems on the conventional tests were non-entrenched. For example,correlations were higher with fluid than with crystallised ability tests and correlationswere higher the more novel the fluid test was. These results show that tests ofcreative intelligence have some overlap with conventional tests (e.g. in requiringverbal skills or the ability to analyse one’s own ideas) (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995)but also tap skills beyond those measured even by relatively novel kinds of items onthe conventional tests of intelligence.

The work we did on creativity revealed a number of sources of individual anddevelopmental differences.

1. To what extent was the thinking of the individual novel or non-entrenched?2. What was the quality of the individual’s thinking?3. To what extent did the thinking of the individual meet the demands of the

task?

We also found, though, that creativity, broadly defined, extends beyond theintellectual domain. Sources of individual and developmental differences in creativeperformance include not only process aspects, but aspects of knowledge, thinkingstyles, personality, motivation and the environmental context in which the individualoperates (for details see Sternberg & Lubart, 1995).

Creative thinking skills can be taught and we have devised a programme forteaching them (Sternberg & Williams, 1996). In some of our work we divided 86gifted and non-gifted fourth grade children into experimental and control groups.All children took pre-tests on insightful thinking. Then some of the children receivedtheir regular school instruction whereas others received instruction on insight skills.After the instruction of whichever kind, all children took a post-test on insight skills.We found that children taught how to solve the insight problems using knowledgeacquisition components gained more from pre-test to post-test than did studentswho were not so taught (Davidson & Sternberg, 1984).

WHAT FORM DOES TEACHING FOR CREATIVITY TAKE?

In teaching students to process information creatively, we encourage them to create,invent, discover, explore, imagine and suppose. However, we believe that, to a largeextent, creativity is not just a matter of thinking in a certain way, but rather it is anattitude toward life (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995, 1996). Creative people are creative,in large part, because they have decided to be creative (Sternberg, 2000). What arethe decisions that underlie creative thinking? Perhaps there are at least 12 key ones.

1. Redefine problems. Redefining a problem means taking a problem that mostpeople see in one way and allowing and even prodding oneself to see it inanother way. It means not simply accepting things because other peopleaccept them.

2. Analyse your own ideas. No one has only good ideas. Even the most creativepsychologists sometimes make mistakes. Students need to learn to critiquetheir own ideas; to be the first to decide which of their ideas are really worth

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pursuing and, later, to admit when they have made a mistake. Everyoneshould retain a healthy degree of scepticism about any idea he or she has.No one is right all the time, and people who lose their scepticism abouttheir own ideas may quickly reach dead ends because they may believe theyhave all the answers.

3. Sell your ideas. When we are young we may believe that creative ideas sellthemselves. They don’t. The creative process does not end with theirgeneration or even with their being critiqued. Because creative ideaschallenge existing ways of doing things, they must be ‘sold’ to the public,whether scientific or lay.

4. Knowledge is a double-edged sword. To be creative one has to be knowledge-able: one cannot go beyond what is known without knowing it. However,knowledge can also impede creativity (Frensch & Sternberg, 1989).Experts can become entrenched in ways of seeing things and lose sight ofother perspectives or points of view. It becomes important, therefore, forteachers to impress upon students that students have as much to teachteachers as teachers have to teach students. The teachers have the advan-tage of knowledge, the students of flexibility. Working together, they canaccomplish more than either can on their own. Teachers have to beespecially careful that they not dismiss students’ views simply because theviews happen not to fit into their own views of the world. On the one hand,one cannot be creative without knowledge. Quite simply, one cannot gobeyond the existing state of knowledge if one does not know what that stateis. Many children have ideas that are creative with respect to themselves,but not with respect to the field because others have had the same ideasbefore. Those with a greater knowledge base can be creative in ways thatthose who are still learning about the basics of the field cannot be. At thesame time, those who have an expert level of knowledge can experiencetunnel vision, narrow thinking and entrenchment. Experts can become sostuck in a way of thinking that they become unable to extricate themselvesfrom it. Such narrowing does not just happen to others. It happens toeveryone. Learning must be a lifelong process, not one that terminateswhen a person achieves some measure of recognition. When a personbelieves that he or she knows everything there is to know, he or she isunlikely to ever show truly meaningful creativity again.

5. Surmount obstacles. Because creative people ‘defy the crowd’, they inevitablyconfront obstacles. The question is not whether they will confront obsta-cles, but whether they will have the guts to surmount them.

6. Take sensible risks. Our educational system often encourages students toplay it safe. On tests they give safe answers. When they write papers theytry to second-guess what their professors want to hear. But creative peoplealways are people who are willing to risk something and, in the process, failsome of the time in order to succeed other times. Teachers need toencourage such risk taking.

7. Willingness to grow. Many people have one creative idea early in their career

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and then spend the rest of their life unfolding that idea. They becomeunwilling or even afraid to go beyond that idea. Perhaps early on theyfought the scientific or other establishment to win acceptance of that idea.Later, they become that establishment, fighting against the new ideas thatthreaten their own self-perceived monopoly on truth.

8. Believe in yourself. Creative people often find that their ideas get a poorreception. I suspect that all truly creative people come to believe, at sometime or another, that they have lost most or all their external sources ofintellectual and even emotional support. At these times, in particular, it isparticularly important that they maintain their belief in themselves, tomaintain a sense of self-efficacy (Bandura, 1996). If they lose this belief,they will find themselves with nothing.

9. Tolerance of ambiguity. When we try creative things we often find that intheir early or even sometimes late stages they do not work out the way theyseemingly should. We go through prolonged, uncomfortable stages ofambiguity where things just do not quite fall into place. Yet, in order to becreative, we need to tolerate ambiguity long enough to get our ideas right.

10. Find what you love to do and do it. If research about creativity showsanything, it is that people are at their most creative when they are doingwhat they love to do (see, for example, Amabile, 1996). As teachers,therefore, we need to encourage students to find their own niche, their ownlove of psychology or anything else, and not to try to turn them intodisciples or ‘intellectual clones’ who will do ‘our thing’ rather than theirown.

11. Allowing time. Being creative takes time (Gruber & Wallace, 1999). Theview that most creative inspirations come in an isolated flash simply is notcorrect. Students need to learn to allow time for incubation, reflection andselection among alternative ideas. If they always rush, or are rushed, theywill have difficulty producing creative work.

12. Allowing mistakes. People learn from their mistakes. However if childrenbecome afraid to make mistakes, they will have trouble being creative.Creative people often have many failed ideas or products along the way totheir successful ones. Had they not had the opportunities to make thesemistakes, they perhaps never would have generated the idea or product forwhich they became well known.

CONCLUSION

Our main conclusions are as follows. First, creative thinking is relatively distinctfrom analytical and practical thinking. Knowing someone’s skills in analytical orpractical thinking will not say much about the person’s skills in creative thinking.Second, teaching for creative thinking in schools can improve children’s academicperformance. It helps the more creative children to capitalise on a strength at thesame time that it helps the less creative children to compensate for or correct a

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weakness. Third, creativity is in large part an attitude toward life. Specific decisionscan be made that enhance creativity.

Although, in this article, the discussion has been about creativity in general,creativity can be of different kinds. Sternberg (1999b) has presented what he refersto as a propulsion model of creative contributions (see also Sternberg et al., 2001b,2002). The idea is that creative contributions ‘propel’ a field forward in some way;they are the result of creative leadership on the part of their creators. The propulsionmodel is a descriptive taxonomy of eight types of creative contributions. Althoughthe eight types of contributions may differ in the extent of creative contribution theymake, there is no a priori way of evaluating amount of creativity on the basis of thetype of creative contribution. Certain types of creative contributions probably tend,on average, to be greater in amounts of novelty than are others. For example,replications tend, on average, not to be highly novel. But creativity also involvesquality of work, and the type of creative contribution a work makes does notnecessarily predict the quality of that work.

The eight types of creative contributions are as follows.

1. Replication. The creative contribution represents an effort to show that agiven field is where it should be. The propulsion is intended to keep the fieldwhere it is rather than moving it.

2. Redefinition. The creative contribution represents an effort to redefine wherethe field currently is. The current status of the field is thus seen from a newpoint of view.

3. Forward incrementation. The creative contribution represents an attempt tomove the field forward in the direction in which it already is moving and thecontribution takes the field to a point to which others are ready to go.

4. Advance forward incrementation. The creative contribution represents anattempt to move the field forward in the direction it is already going, but thecontribution moves beyond where others are ready for the field to go.

5. Redirection. The creative contribution represents an attempt to move thefield from where it is currently headed toward a new and different direction.

6. Reconstruction/redirection. The creative contribution represents an attempt tomove the field back to where it once was (a reconstruction of the past) sothat the field may move onward from that point, but in a direction differentfrom the one it took in the past.

7. Reinitiation. The creative contribution represents an attempt to move thefield to a different and as yet not reached starting point and then to move thefield in a new direction from that point.

8. Integration. The creative contribution represents an attempt to move the fieldby putting together aspects of two or more past kinds of contributions thatformerly were viewed as distinct or even opposed. This type of contributionshows the potentially dialectical nature of creative contributions particularlywell, in that it merges into a new Hegelian type of synthesis two ideas thatformerly may have been seen as opposed (Sternberg, 1999a).

The eight types of creative contributions described above are viewed as qualita-

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tively distinct. However, within each type there can be quantitative differences. Forexample, a forward incrementation may represent a fairly small step forward for agiven field or it may represent a substantial leap. A reinitiation may restart an entirefield or just a small area of that field. Moreover, a given contribution may overlapcategories. For example, a forward incrementation may be the result of an inte-gration of somewhat closely related concepts in the field.

Teachers may think they are rewarding creativity but only be rewarding onekind of creativity. When we teach for creativity in schools, then, we need toencourage all kinds of creativity, not just the more conventional kinds (such asforward incrementation). Teachers who reward all kinds of creativity are those whoare likely to find among their students those who have made one of the mostimportant decisions a person can make in his or her life: the decision to be creative.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Preparation of this article was supported by grant REC-9979843 from the NationalScience Foundation and grant no. R206R000001 from the US Office of EducationalResearch and Improvement and a grant from the W.T. Grant Foundation. Thissupport does not imply acceptance or endorsement of the positions taken in thearticle.

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