Creativity is increasingly considered to be an important goal of education. While creativity can be influenced by many noncognitive factors (eg, personality and motivation), creative thinking remains the most important source of creativity. Creative thinking combines several cognitive processes leading to the generation and selection of new and…

This article explores how creative visual imagination and creative thinking can help children to construct mental models of space. A mixed-method study, integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches and involving 98 five-year-old children (54 girls and 44 boys) demonstrated that creative visual imagination, rather than creative thinking, is…

This paper presents the findings of visual analyses conducted on 369 sketch ideas generated in three 6-3-5 visual brainstorming sessions by a total of 25 participants, following the same design brief. The motivation for the study was an interest in the thematic content of the ideas generated as groups, and the individual representation styles used…

Developing "Thinking and Understanding in Young Children" presents a comprehensive and accessible overview of contemporary theory and research about young children's developing thinking and understanding. Throughout this second edition, the ideas and theories presented are enlivened by transcripts of children's activities and conversations taken…

Innovation and enterprise depend for their success on the development of new ideas. But from where do new ideas come? How do they arise? Finding solutions to such questions is at the heart of creativity research and the solving of novel problems. Reflection, not only in cognitive processes but also in the non-cognitive ones used in solving novel…

If education is concerned with imagination, it is important to know how educators perceive the term. For this purpose, an attempt was made to categorize ways in which teachers conceptualize imagination. Responses were obtained in a survey from 120 teachers who were registered in a graduate course on creative thinking. Participants ranged in age…

A study examined whether exemplar-specific or prototype representations were primarily used by 28 children (ages 10-12) with mild mental retardation in a categorization task consisting of two groups of make-believe animals whose features were ill-defined. Results indicated the children were able to acquire and use both types of representations.…

In an attempt to find out more about how creative people engage in thinking, more than 50 men and women considered to be prominant in the humanities, the arts, and the sciences were interviewed. Letters, diaries and autobiographies of other creative individuals were examined in an effort to provide a broad base for studying the psychology of…

Using the metaphoric story device of two tribes, one that builds their culture around words and the other which depends primarily on visual perception, this paper suggests a distinctive mental paradigm at work within the society of artists, who pursue visual literacy through graphic ideation. The author discusses his education in art and his…

These 28 interdisciplinary learning activities for elementary children are designed to provide perceptual, cognitive, and personal-social growth experiences. Subject areas included are art, dance, language arts, math, music, science, career education, health, physical education, reading, and social studies. The teaching strategies, which provide…