Fostering students' mathematical creativity is important for their understanding and success in mathematics courses as well as their persistence in STEM, but it necessitates intentional instructional actions, such as designing and implementing tasks that have the potential to foster creativity. As teaching innovation requires support for…

The traditionally studied positive outcomes of creativity tend to be product-focused, such as Big-C contributions, good grades, or strong work performance. This paper makes an argument for the importance of less-discussed products of the process--the benefits that arise from being creative, regardless of one's abilities or level of achievement.…

The last few decades have seen a growing trend toward the analysis of creativity and flow experiences in pedagogy, but we have only a limited knowledge of how cultural institutions can contribute to flow experiences in learning processes. Our study argues that the effectiveness of learning might be enhanced by the experiential accumulation of…

Integrating science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) education has become an emphasis in many countries' K-12 curricula. Design-based learning is an instructional approach that allows students to learn STEAM in more integrated ways than the traditional method. Using design thinking as a pedagogical framework, design-based…

The concept of assemblage, drawing on the posthuman theorisations of Deleuze and Guattari, delineates a dynamic and new materialist approach to an event. In this approach, desires, material agency and (de)(re)territorialisation emerge as key concepts, and open ways to understand the school classroom in early childhood as a territory where lines of…

Based on a detailed reading of Graham Wallas' "Art of Thought" (1926) it is argued that his four-stage model of the creative process (Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification), in spite of holding sway as a conceptual anchor for many creativity researchers, does not reflect accurately Wallas' full account of the creative…

Arthur Cropley (2006) emphasized the critical place that convergent thinking has in creativity. Although he briefly refers to the blind variation and selective retention (BVSR) theory of creativity, his discussion could not reflect the most recent theoretical and empirical developments in BVSR, especially the resulting combinatorial models.…

One critical step toward to a better understanding of creativity is to unveil its underlying genetic architectures. Recently, several studies have been conducted to investigate the effects of dopamine (DA) and 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT) related genetic polymorphisms on creativity. Among DA related genes, dopamine D2 receptor gene…

Interdisciplinary research can be defined as the practice of discovering new objects of knowledge beyond disciplinary borders. It often operates through the cross-fertilization and hybridization of concepts, theoretical frameworks, and methodological tools to enable the description, analysis, and understanding of the complexity of objects of study…

Background: Extending Merton's (1936) work on the consequences of purposive social action, the model, theory and taxonomy outlined here incorporates and formalizes both anticipated and unanticipated research findings in a unified theoretical framework. The model of anticipated research findings was developed initially by Carifio (1975, 1977) and…

This paper examines Vygotsky's conception of play as a leading activity in the contexts of children's contemporary play worlds. Commencing with an examination of the relationship between leading activities and the development of psychological functions, the paper moves into a consideration of the relationship between imagination and reality as a…

The role of serendipity or "chance in all its forms" in scientific discovery is considered. The need to differentiate between purely accidental events and Rothenberg's "articulations of error" when discussing scientific discoveries is stressed. Examples of articulations of errors are noted, including Fleming (penicillin),…

Interviews with eleven Nobel Prize winners illustrate that, although a scientific discovery generally involves some kind of imaginative insight, there is no one obvious pattern whereby it manifests itself. (Author/MJB)

First itemizing the barriers to creative thinking, the author proceeds to suggest brainstorming, morphology, and a method of alternating circles as procedures to encourage creativity. Courses in problem-solving have proven successful. (AG)

Creativity theory supports the conclusion that when a person recognizes the isomorphism in an analogic construct, that insight is the essentially creative act. Infraconscious mentation is more likely to produce insightful analogies than is rigorous, willful, consciously rational mentation, because infraconscious mentation, operating in the mode of…