The divergent thinking skills in science of 282 US high school students were investigated across 16 weeks of instruction in order to determine whether typical academic time periods can significantly influence changes in thinking skills. Students' from 6 high school science classrooms completed the Scientific Structures Creativity Measure (SSCM)…

It is generally perceived that a substantial number of engineering faculty are still unaware of alternative educational methods, and many who are aware of them choose not to incorporate them into their approach to teaching. There are several likely reasons for this inertia, aside from the inevitable human resistance to change. The primary focus of…

Fostering and enabling critical and creative thinking of students is considered an important goal, and it is assumed that in particular, talented students have considerable potential for applying such high-level cognitive processes for learning in classrooms. However, Chinese students are often considered as rote learners, and that learning…

Although experimentally induced positive mood can generally last for 20 min and the induced mood is conducive to creative performance, it is still unclear whether the facilitation effect is stable during these 20 min. Two studies were conducted to examine this issue while controlling for the impacts of task switching, practice effect, and test…

This paper investigates the utilization of a social network tool in order to promote creativity in higher education. Buddypress was selected as a social network tool and de Bono's "6 thinking hats" as a creativity strategy. The participants were 17 undergraduate students from a case study in a University in Greece in the field of social…

Creative and critical thinking skills are the abilities, which can sometimes be used interchangeably in definition. In fact, they have different constructs because they differentiate in outcome of human behaviours. Also one of today's requirements is that individuals should approach everyday problems by using both competences. So, one of the…

This study sought to explore creative cognitive processes and the similarities and differences in how descriptions of these processes group together in various self-report subscales. Based on empirical evidence from numerous studies involving the cognitive components of creativity training, the Cognitive Processes Associated with Creativity (CPAC)…

Cognitive flexibility is one of the essential mental abilities underlying creative thinking. Previous findings have shown that cognitive flexibility can be enhanced by schema violations, and it has been suggested that active involvement is needed for schema violations to facilitate cognitive flexibility. The possibility that identification with an…

Conceptual combinations may be interpreted by 3 main strategies: by attributing a feature of the modifying (head) noun into the modified noun (property interpretation); by establishing a relation between the 2 concepts (relational interpretation); or by combining properties of both nouns into a concept with new identity (hybridization). There…

Four experiments examined the interplay of memory and creative cognition, showing that attempting to think of new uses for an object can cause the forgetting of old uses. Specifically, using an adapted version of the Alternative Uses Task (Guilford, 1957), participants studied several uses for a variety of common household objects before…

Leading education thinker Sir Ken Robinson says transformation is essential to bring creative thinking into schools and recommends three major changes: Dispense with subject hierarchy, focus on curricular disciplines instead of subjects, and elevate personalization. Change will come when students take ownership of their learning to fit their needs…

In this paper I will explain what I see as some of the core attributes of "Communities of Innovation," or communities fostering collaborative creativity, and what we have learned from the research literature about each attribute. There is a critical need to design learning environments that foster creative thinking in students,…

This study examines the sudden enlightenment sect of Chan (or Zen in Japanese terms) in order to understand various aspects of teaching and learning in the Buddhist tradition in China. To unravel Chan's educational import, we analyze its aesthetic features through a Western lens in order to highlight significant aspects of the teaching/learning…

Nationally, Black males are more under-represented in gifted programs than all other groups (United States Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, Civil rights data collection. Author, Washington, DC, 2006, 2009); at no time in the history of gifted education can data be found to indicate otherwise (Ford in "Multicultural gifted…

This essay is an attempt to add to the argument that beauty matters in education through offering a reciprocal but interconnected point: if the dynamic harmony and deep connectedness of beauty need to be taken seriously, so must their aesthetic converse--the disharmony and estrangement of failure. While the discourse of philosophical aesthetics…