The Inventive Thinking Curriculum Project is one of the many projects included in the national outreach program of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. It is designed to be used in conjunction with a thinking skills program as a means of applying critical and creative thinking and problem-solving skills through the activity of creating an…

Imaging is the process of creating mental pictures that can be scanned as people would scan a current event. It is a real, powerful personal process, which has been used in medicine, science, health care, sports, creativity, education, and other areas. On a day-to-day level, imaging can be used to engineer insights regarding self-concept,…

Studies of creativity have generally dealt with the creative act, typically defined as the statistically infrequent approach to problem solving. A study was conducted to determine whether a relationship exists between problem discovery and originality of the written product, and whether problem-finding behavior may be observed in student writers.…

Subjects for which aesthetics and creative performance are critical curricular dimensions (such as art, physical education, music, and technology education), and which are accommodative of students across the range of intelligences (Gardner, 1999) are not readily or completely captured by content standards. Therefore content knowledge in these…

An earlier version of this article appeared in Williams, F.E. (Ed.), "First Seminar on Productive Thinking in Education. St. Paul, Minnesota: Macalester College, 1966.

Creativity can be considered a function of knowledge, imagination, and evaluation and usually programed instruction is thought to be detrimental to creative behavior since the material is highly structured and the responses are usually restricted. However, this need not be so, for one seed of creativity, student control, is inherent in programed…

The author reviews the research conducted on dyadic interaction and its role in the development of creative thinking and problem solving. Earlier research has shown that children at a certain stage prefer to work alone rather than with other children. However, empirical data have shown on the whole that dyadic interactions result in better…

Synectics is a method of creative problem solving through the use of metaphor and apparent irrelevancy developed by William J. J. Gordon. The process involves rational knowledge of the problem to be solved, irrational improvisations that lead to fertile associations creating new approaches to the problem, and euphoric state that is essential in…

Administrators and supervisory personnel (N=20) of a hospital participated in a workshop in "Creative Management". Participants received eight hours of training in: creative thinking and problem-solving; leadership and group dynamics; and motivation. Comparisons of pre- and posttest ratings revealed gains in both the Leadership and Total Test…

Examines brainstorming as an aid to creative group problem solving. Presents a history of its practice, a survey of empirical studies, and theoretical explanations for the superiority of individual over group brainstorming. (PD)

Individuals who are capable of perceiving others in complex and divergent ways may be able to communicate more effectively. This proposition represents a link between several fields of inquiry that researchers rarely interrelate: higher level thinking skills, social cognition, social competency, and communications. (Author/MLW)

Direct instruction of brainstorming, product-improvement techniques, and verbal problem solving to 19 third graders for 30 minutes per week significantly improved their performance on the flexibility and originality components of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking. No significant change occurred on the fluency component, perhaps a result of…

A seven-step program is described for allowing students to try their hand at solving problems of the future. Goals of the program are to encourage students to think more creatively, increase their research and communication skills, and develop problem solving skills. (TE)

Defines problem solving, discusses the use of problems developed by students that are relevant to their own lives, presents examples of practical mathematics problems that deal with local situations, discusses fringe benefits of this type of problem solving, and addresses teachers' concern that this method consumes too much time. (MBR)

Problem-solving can be an exercise in mystification for some students. Six suggestions are given for presenting word problems in mathematics in ways that make them more accessible and comprehensible for young students. (PP)