To explore whether the facilitation effects of an explicit instruction to "be creative" vary across cultures and types of tasks, 248 U.S. and 278 Chinese college students were administered a battery of tests of verbal, artistic, and mathematical creativity. Half of the participants were tested under the standard condition, and the other half under…

Art education students who become art teachers are, for the most part, educated first as artists and second as art educators. Given this dual education, there is some evidence to suggest that they may experience contradictions in their career development that seriously impact the construction of their professional role and identity as artists and…

The threshold hypothesis regarding creativity and intelligence suggests that these two constructs are positively correlated except at the higher end of the IQ distribution, where they are unrelated. Much of the support for this hypothesis comes from comparisons of correlations within average and high-IQ groups. However, a common methodological…

Originality is a necessary part of creativity, but creative things are more than just original. They also solve a problem, or more generally are somehow fitting or appropriate. Yet previous research found an inverse relationship between ratings of originality and ratings of appropriateness. The present investigation employed a different…

This study examined whether divergent thinking test scores obtained from engineering students during college predicted creative work activities fifteen years later. Results showed that a subscore of the "Owens Creativity Test", which assesses divergent thinking about mechanical objects, correlated significantly with self-ratings of creative work…

Creative achievement of teams is increasingly recognized as an organization's most valuable production. With dramatically advancing technology producing an almost unlimited amount of available information, the crucial challenge to many corporate and government organizations is how to use that information most creatively. While little expense is…

The paper brings the results of a project that passed on to students the opportunity for re-presenting their acquired knowledge via the construction of multi-modal "learning resources". These "learning resources" substituted for lectures and books and became the official learning sources in the classroom. The rational for the project was multiple:…

The arts and sciences have been identified as two specific domains that are dependent upon the creative process. A total of 369 undergraduate students served as research participants in two separate studies. In the first study, participants (N = 238) completed a measure of Openness to Experience (NEO-PI; McCrae & Costa, 1999) and a questionnaire…

This study focuses on behavior associated with young art students' developing artistic talent ("skills and art-making behavior") and creativity ("personal expressions of visual information"). The study examines the role of personal expertise in a student's development of problem finding, domain-specific technical skill, perseverance, evaluation,…

Selection theory requires multiple, distinct, simultaneously-actualized states. In cognition, each thought or cognitive state changes the "selection pressure" against which the next is evaluated; they are not simultaneously selected amongst. Creative thought is more a matter of honing in on a vague idea through redescribing successive iterations…

The question of whether creativity is content general or content specific is one of the most controversial issues in contemporary creativity research. Recent studies provide support for both positions, but the results of these investigations may be influenced by several factors, including the presence of a method effect (i.e., psychometric vs.…

Although previous research indicates that nominal groups generally outperform interactive groups at brainstorming tasks, companies still favor group interaction because of its presumed benefits beyond the brainstorming task. This study assesses the effectiveness of both types of groups in two domains that follow idea generation: selection of ideas…

Three studies sought to determine whether incubation effects could be reliably generated in a problem-solving task. Experimental variables manipulated were the duration of the interval between two problem-solving opportunities and the activity performed by the problem solvers during the interval. A multisolution anagram task was used which…

The issue of racial/ethnic and gender differences in intelligence and academic abilities is fiercely and frequently debated, yet the examination of these differences in creativity is less studied. Our goal in this study was to use the Consensual Assessment Technique, in which experts judge a product's creativity, to examine differences in…

The original work of Alex Osborn making the creative process more explicit, and the following 50 years of research and development on creative problem solving, have made an important and wide-spread contribution to those interested in the deliberate development of creative talent. This article provided a summary of the many versions of creative…