Studies Explore How to Nurture Students' Creativity

In the continuing debate about American competitiveness in the global economy, politicians and educators alike have pointed not to students' test scores, but to their creativity and ingenuity, as models for the rest of the world.

Teaching creativity has been a hot-button topic this fall, from the National Academy of Education's annual meeting in Washington to a Learning and the Brain conference in Boston. Yet researchers are just beginning to determine what makes some students more creative than their peers, and how the classroom environment can nurture or smother that ability.

"To study creativity of young people who are on the move, we can't use our established habits," Shirley Brice Heath, an English professor emerita at Stanford University, told members of the education academy at its annual research meeting, which highlighted creativity and innovation.

"We can't look under the streetlight to find any keys we think we may have lost with regard to creativity," she said. "After all, schools are where the light has always been; that's not where the light is now with respect to creativity."

Howard E. Gardner, a professor of cognition and education at Harvard University, considers creativity one of five "minds," or ways of thinking—along with discipline, synthesis, respect, and ethics—that will be essential for young people to succeed in the future.

"We live in an era where everything that can be automated will be," he said at the Learning and the Brain research conference last month. "Only individuals who can regularly go beyond the conventional wisdom will be valued.

"While cognitive capacities are obviously valuable for creating," he said, "only those of a robust, risk-taking personality and temperament are likely to pursue a creative path."

Transfer Claims

Ellen Winner, the psychology chair and the director of the Arts and Mind Lab at Boston College, told participants at the Learning and the Brain conference that in a continuing series of studies on arts education and creativity, she had found "very little evidence that studying the arts improves grades or test scores, or that studying the arts improves creativity.

"These transfer claims have been posited without any particular mechanism; there's a lot of magical thinking going on," said Ms. Winner.

She said she found two "fatal flaws" in most studies linking arts education to creativity: First, few studies described what is actually taught and learned in different arts classes that is intended to make students think more creatively; and, second, most of the studies used general paper-and-pencil tests that did not capture dynamic or subject-specific aspects of creativity.

"The most difficult problem we're facing is coming up with valid measures of creativity in ...

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