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From Ershadi, M., Winner, E., 2020. Children's Creativity. In: Runco, M., Pritzker, S.
(Eds.), Encyclopedia of Creativity, 3rd edition, vol. 1. Elsevier, Academic Press, pp.
144–148.
ISBN: 9780128156148
Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Academic Press
Author's personal copy
Children’s Creativity
Mahsa Ershadi and Ellen Winner, Department of Psychology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, United States
© 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction 144
The Nature of Children’s Creativity 144
The Assessment of Children’s Creativity 145
The Development of Children’s Creativity 145
Factors Affecting Children’s Creativity 146
Externally Caused Factors 146
Internal Factors 147
Conclusion 147
References 147
Further Reading 147
Introduction
Consider children’s creativity and you may be reminded of a cardboard box transmogrified into a space ship, a pillowcase crafted
into a super hero’s cape, or a magical fort made-up of blankets strewn over strategically arranged dining room chairs. Supply chil-
dren with crayons, paint, clay, paper, and scissors, and they will experiment and construct fantastical images and playthings. In fact,
children will engage in pretend play, improvise songs and dances, tell stories, and make-up imaginary friends often without
abandon or the need for ‘toys’in such a spontaneous and natural way that it seems it go without question that children are creative.
While it is easy to see that children are creative, it is also clear that their creativity is qualitatively distinct from the type of domain-
changing creativity associated with eminent artists and scientists such as Beethoven, Maya Angelou, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs.
In what follows, we address the nature of creativity seen in typical children, the methods for assessing this disposition, and the
factors which impede and those that promote children’s creativity. We write from the assumption that creativity, like intelligence,
is domain-specific(Gardner, 1983), and that creativity is distinct from intelligence because any intelligence can beused in a more or
less creative way.
The Nature of Children’s Creativity
The standard definition of creativity focusses on product: a creative individual is someone who produces something novel and valu-
able within a domain –whether an intangible creation such as a theory, joke, or musical composition, or a physical production such
as an invention, literary work or sculpture. This definition clearly refers to the kind of domain-changing creativity we refer to here as
Big-C creativity. Although levels of creativity lie on a continuum, investigations of creativity have traditionally distinguished little-c
creativity (the kind measured by standard creativity tests) and Big C creativity. Big-C creativity describes revolutionary contributions
like Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb and Picasso’s invention (with Braque) of cubism; little-c creativity refers to more
ordinary innovations such as repurposing leftovers for a new delicious meal.
Which of these do children demonstrate? Given that one must master a domain –said to take about ten years –before one can
change it, then by definition no child can be Big-C creative. Typical children are little-c creators. Even child prodigies cannot be
considered creative in the Big-C sense: Mozart’s 5-year-old composition, Minuet and Trio in G major, was stunning for a 5-year-
old, but it did not change the domain of classical music. Blaise Pascal’s discovery at age of 12 that the interior angles of a triangle
always add up to the sum of two right angles was equally stunning, but did not change the domain of mathematics since this
concept had already been discovered. But, Mozart’s and Pascal’s childhood creativity are qualitatively distinct from the creative
play seen in a typical preschool classroom, and this has led to the concept of mini-c creativity. Beghetto and Kaufman (2007)
propose distinguishing the creativity of the average child from that of the prodigy (or amateur artist, in their terms) by calling
that of the prodigy mini-c.
Unlike the Big/little categories, which focuson creative expression and production, the mini-c category emphasizes creative poten-
tial and the creative process; thus, offering a new standard for evaluating children’s creativity. Mini-c creativity refers to “the novel and
personally meaningful interpretation of experiences, actions, and events,”to the “dynamic, interpretive process of constructing
personal knowledge and understanding within a particular sociocultural context”(Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009). The mini-c concept
aligns with the Vygotskian conception of creative development, which posits that all individuals possess creative potential that begins
with an “internalization or appropriation of cultural tools and social interaction .not just copying but rather a transformation or
reorganization of incoming information and mental structures based on the individual’s characteristics and existing knowledge”
(Moran and John-Steiner, 2003, p. 63). The mini-c category underscores the value of recognizing creative aspects associated with
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the ‘beginner’s mind’like openness to new experiences, active observation, and willingness to be surprised, and explore the unknown
(Richards, 2007). The mini-c category offers a level of specificity that can allow children’s creative interpretations and ideations, as well
as the associated behaviors and attitudes, to be recognized and nurtured by parents and educators (Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009).
Although there has been some effort to develop a systematic coding frame for micro-level measurements of creativity (described later
in this chapter), we do not yet have a standardized valid and reliable way of assessing mini-c creativity.
The Assessment of Children’s Creativity
In 1957, the Soviet Union beat the United States into orbit by successfully launching Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. In response
to this defeat, American psychologists developed a wide variety of tests to assess children’s creative potential, specifically in science
and math. Ever since, a plethora of tests have become available for assessing children’s creativity at the level of the person, the crea-
tive product, and the process. A review of the literature on children’s creativity shows that 80% most of studies employ measures on
the level of the person or the product (Kupers et al., 2018). Clearly, more research is needed on the creative process.
Divergent thinking tasks are commonly used as indicators of creative potential, and most measures of children’s creativity have
focused on ideational fluency in which participants must generate as many responses as they can to a particular stimulus. An
example of such a task is the Alternative Uses Task where participants are asked to list as many uses as possible for a common
item. Responses are scored in term of originality (as compared to responses from other children), fluency (number of responses),
flexibility (number of different categories), and elaboration (amount of detail).
The most widely used assessment of divergent thinking is the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, which includes a verbal section
(Thinking Creatively with Words) consisting of six activities (asking, guessing causes, guessing consequences, product improvement,
unusual uses, unusual questions, and just suppose) and a nonverbal section (Thinking Creatively with Pictures) consisting of three
figural activities (picture construction, picture completion, and lines/circles). As is the case with the Alternative Uses Test, scores on
the Torrance are based on fluency, flexibility, and originality.
Unlike the Alternative Uses and Torrance Tests, which are domain-general assessments of creativity, the Evaluation of Potential
for Creativity is used to assess domain-specific divergent and convergent thinking via both verbal and graphic tasks appropriate for
elementary through middle school students. The Evaluation of Potential for Creativity is domain-specific, with versions for artistic,
literary, social, math, science, and music creativity (Barbot et al., 2011).
Despite their popularity, some creativity researchers have questioned the usefulness of divergent thinking tasks. Simonton
(2003, p. 216) expressed concern that “none of these suggested measures can be said to have passed all the psychometric hurdles
required of established ability tests. For instance, scores on separate creativity tests often correlate too highly with general intelli-
gence (low divergent validity), correlate very weakly among one another (low convergent validity), and correlate very weakly
with objective indicators of overt creative behaviors (low predictive validity).”Although new approaches to the assessment of diver-
gent thinking have been proposed (e.g. top-2 scoring method, in which participants are asked to select their two most creative ideas,
which then are evaluated for creativity; Silvia et al., 2008), these evaluations are still just snapshots of creativity that do not capture
in real-time the core of creativity, namely the creative process.
Alternatively, Kaufman and Beghetto (2009) suggest self-assessments and microgenetic methods as more naturalistic and infor-
matively rich approaches to pencil-and-paper measures of creative potential, argued to better illuminate the developmental process
of children’s creativity (mini-c). Self-assessments are useful because they require students to reflect on their own creativity, and thus
can reveal how children think about their creativity. The microgenetic method combines close observations (typically video
recorded) of children as they progress through developmental stages, and repeated measurements (such as asking children for
immediate retrospective explanations of their thoughts and actions) over the course of time. This method has been previously
used to study children’s learning (Siegler, 2006), and could provide a detailed illustration of the development of a child’s creativity
by allowing researchers to identify and examine dynamic microlevel changes in psychological structures. Five specific dimensions
can be examined through the microgenetic method: the path of change (is the change qualitative or quantitative?); the rate of
change (is the change sudden or slow?); the breadth of change (is the change domain-specific or generalizable across domains?;
the variability of change (how variable is a person’s behavior across similar tasks within a domain?); the source of change (what
do the changes in behavior, such as strategy use, suggest about the source of change?; Siegler, 2006). Researchers interested in using
the microgenetic method to study children’s creativity, could employ the coding system proposed by Kupers et al. (2018) which
captures the two core components of creativity –novelty and appropriateness –on an ordinal four-point scale at each moment
during the creative process. The coding frame follows three steps: first, researchers must determine the unit of measurement (the
level of detail in which they wish to study the creative process), and they then code the units in terms of novelty and appropriate-
ness. This measure is a preliminary and not yet validated, but could well serve as the state of the art in children’s creative potential
assessment by providing a fuller picture of what is provided by narrower, standard psychometric approaches.
The Development of Children’s Creativity
Elsewhere, we have proposed that artistic development in children follows a U-shaped curve (Gardner and Winner, 1981), with
preschool children’s processes and product similar to those of adult artists, followed by a period between childhood and adulthood
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characterized by literalism. Thus, children’s drawings are at first playful, joyful, and unconcerned with the conventions of represen-
tation or realism. By middle childhood their drawings become more stereotyped as they master the conventions of the graphic
domain and focus on the rules of realistic representation. By late adolescence, at least among those children who will become artists,
conventions are now broken. Thus, the preschool child is preconventional; the adult artist is post-conventional. Most adults
however never emerge from the literal stage. This three-stage model has been shown to fit both the development of drawing
and of non-literal language use (Gardner and Winner, 1981).
We can draw a connection here to the stages of children’s creativity: it has been argued that young children are more creative
than (typical) adults. Both Pablo Picasso and John Lennon shared the belief that artistic impulse is strongest in the early years of
life and often attenuates as a child matures. This sentiment is echoed in the most watched TED talk of all time titled “Do schools
kill creativity?”in which educationalist Sir Ken Robinson argues that “we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it.”In fact,
a longitudinal study examining creative capacity across childhood showed that when kindergartners were tested, 98 percent scored
at the genius level in divergent thinking on the test employed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to select
innovative engineers and scientists. The same children were re-tested when they were ten and 15 years old, at which point
only 32 percent and 12 percent scored as high, respectively. Moreover, only a mere two percent of adults over the age of 25 demon-
strated the same high level of creativity as the five-year-olds in the study (Land and Jarman, 1992). Kim (2011) found a similar
trend of diminishing creativity with age; her analysis of the Torrance scores of 272, 599 kindergarten through 12th grade students
and adults between 1974 and 2008 showed that since 1990, even as IQ scores grew higher, creative thinking scores have signif-
icantly declined, especially in kindergarten through third grade. These findings reveal that children have, over the years, become
less able to generate many ideas, generate novel ideas, and elaborate on these ideas, and have become less intellectually curious
and less open to new experiences.
Kim’s study is based on the assumption that creativity is domain-general. However, a study by Weinstein et al. (2014) reported
a decline in the creativity of adolescent writing since 1990, along with a rise in the creativity of adolescent visual artworks (as
assessed qualitatively rather than by a standardized creativity test). Findings like Kim’s as well as Weinstein et al.’s underscore
the need to discover the factors that impede (as well as promote) children’s creativity.
Factors Affecting Children’s Creativity
This loss of creative potential may result from external factors such as pressure to think and behave according to conventions. This
loss might also reflect internal factors such as an increase in reasoning skills and executive functions, which also takes place around
this age and which may interfere with the free play of imagination.
Externally Caused Factors
One factor that may be impeding children’s creativity is the emphasis on rote learning and standardized testing in schools. This
focus stands in direct contrast to play. Beginning at about eighteen months, children engage extensively in pretend play, which
may serve as practice for the types of imaginative thinking observed in the creative activities and innovations of adults. Play –
whether physical, constructive, imaginative, dramatic, or games with rules –is the primary way that humans learn to understand
and experience the world. Yet, instead of prioritizing play, the focus and investment on narrow high-stakes standardized testing
in schools has left little time or resources for children to employ their creative potential.
A second factor that has been shown to impede creativity in children (as well as adults) is the extrinsic motivation to get a good
grade or win a competition. Research has shown that intrinsic motivation is important for creativity, and that extrinsic motivation is
a strong impediment.
A third factor may be parental focus on obedience. Being creative requires taking risks. Creative people innovate novel ideas that
may be criticized, ridiculed, or ignored by audiences. In fact, creativity is most strongly associated with social risk-taking (i.e. the
willingness to challenge norms), which can be an ostracizing experience. If creativity is to develop, it must be encouraged by caring
others in a supportive environment. However, research shows that child obedience is valued over independence by parents in
nations where poverty and lack of education prevail. Given that creativity necessitates risk-taking and sometimes rule-breaking,
it follows that children living in poverty may face an impediment to their creativity from parenting practices that foster obedience
and conformity. Additionally, children from low-income households often attend Title 1 schools –institutions with large concen-
trations of low-income students that adhere to rigid classrooms and high-stakes standardized tests. Furthermore, the No Child Left
Behind Act and Common Core Standards Act caused schools to focus their resources on subjects like reading and math to achieve
high scores on statewide standardized tests. As a result, arts classes (which are more likely to develop creativity than classes requiring
rote learning) received less funding, leading to fewer arts opportunities in schools. The consequence of these budget cuts is less detri-
mental for students who live in affluent communities and receive the benefits of arts education through extracurricular programs,
which may be cost-probative for low-income children.
External factors may also be used to promote creativity –specifically a focus on play. Research has shown that children who partic-
ipated in flexible play experiences showed significantly greater creativity on the Torrance than children participating in highly struc-
tured play experiences. Consistent with these results, Garaigordobil and Berrueco (2011) found verbal and graphic-figural creativity
of preschoolers, and 10- and 11-year-olds improved significantly from a weekly 75-min or two-hour play session throughout the
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academic year. Dansky and Silverman (1973) found that children who were given the opportunity to play with objects gave signif-
icantly more uses for those objects than did children in the control condition who did not get a chance to play with the objects
beforehand; findings from this study highlight the importance of play as a means of encouraging divergent thinking and reducing
functional fixedness (a cognitive bias that limits one’s mental representation of an object to that object’s typical use).
Internal Factors
An internal factor that has been shown to impede creativity in adults is strong cognitive control. Cognitive control, the ability to
limit attention to goal-relevant information, subserves higher-order cognitive functions such as reasoning, attention, planning
and organization. Counterintuitively, deficits in these functions have proven advantageous in certain contexts: low cognitive control
means less filtering of attention, and such unfiltered attention leads to novel solutions in creative problem solving contexts. For
example, young children have weaker cognitive control than do older children, and have also been found to solve creative problems
better than older children (German and Defeyter, 2000). In addition, when cognitive control is compromised because of Attention
Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, age, fatigue, intoxication, and disruption of the pre-frontal cortex due to transcranial direct current
stimulation or lesions, the ability to “think out of the box”is enhanced. In short, impaired cognitive control in adults is associated
with heighted creative thinking, and we are now investigating the possibility that children with low cognitive control (often a result
of the stress of poverty) have enhanced creative abilities. Paradoxically, thus, schools’attempts to enhance cognitive control may
have the unintended consequence of dampening creative potential.
Conclusion
In this chapter, we reviewed research showing that while children demonstrate little-c creativity across a variety of domains, a focus
on mini-c may help to shed light on the process of children’s creativity. A decline of creativity in mid-childhood, “the fourth-grade
slump,”may be a consequence of education systems and child rearing practices that value obedience over play.
As globalization and technological developments accelerate, we face unprecedented social, economic and environmental chal-
lenges. In order to successfully navigate the uncertainties of the future and solve unpredictable problems, our children will need to
develop their creative capacities. Accordingly, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and Partnership for 21st Century Skills have identified creativity and innovation
in problem-solving as fundamental employability skills. Considering that corporate executives and public sector leaders worldwide
cite creativity as the most important leadership quality for success in business, today’s children would be best served by rearing prac-
tices and curricula that nurture the development of their creativity.
References
Barbot, B., Besançon, M., Lubart, T.I., 2011. Assessing creativity in the classroom. Open Educ. J. 4, 58–66.
Beghetto, R.A., Kaufman, J.C., 2007. Toward a broader conception of creativity: a case for "mini-c" creativity. Psychol. Aesthet. Creativity Arts 1,73–79.
Dansky, J., Silverman, F., 1973. Effects of play on associative fluency in preschool-aged children. Dev. Psychol. 9, 38–43.
Gardner, H., 1983. Frames of Mind. Basic Books, New York, NY.
Gardner, H., Winner, E., 1981. First intimations of artistry. In: Strauss, S. (Ed.), U-shaped Behavioral Growth. Academic Press, New York.
German, T.P., Defeyter, M.A., 2000. Immunity to functional fixedness in young children. Psychonomic Bull. Rev. 7, 707–712.
Garaigordobil, M., Berrueco, L., 2011. Effects of a play program on creative thinking of preschool children. Span. J. Psychol. 14, 608–618.
Kaufman, J.C., Beghetto, R.A., 2009. Beyond big and little: the four c model of creativity. Rev. General Psychol. 13, 1–12.
Kupers, E., Van Dijk, M., Lehmann-Wermser, A., 2018. Creativity in the here and now: a generic, micro-developmental measure of creativity. Front. Psychol. 9, 1–14.
Land, G., Jarman, B., 1992. Breakpoint and beyond: Mastering the Future Today. HarperCollins Publishers.
Moran, S., John-Steiner, V., 2003. Creativity in the making: vygotsky’s contemporary contribution to the dialectic of development and creativity. In: Sawyer, R.K., John-Steiner, V.,
Moran, S., Sternberg, R.J., Feldman, D.H., Nakamura, J., Csikszentmihalyi, M. (Eds.), Creativity and Development. Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 61–90.
Richards, R., 2007. Everyday creativity: our hidden potential. In: Richards, R. (Ed.), Everyday Creativity and New Views of Human Nature. American Psychological Association,
Washington, DC, pp. 25–54.
Siegler, R.S., 2006. Microgenetic analyses of learning. In: Damon, W., Lerner, R., Kuhn, D., Siegler, R.S. (Eds.), Handbook of Child Psychology, Cognition, Perception, and
Language, sixth ed., vol. 2. Wiley, Hoboken, NJ.
Silvia, P.J., Winterstein, B.P., Willse, J.T., Barona, C.M., Cram, J.T., Hess, K.I., Martinez, J.L., Richard, C.A., 2008. Assessing creativity with divergent thinking tasks: exploring the
reliability and validity of new subjective scoring methods. Psychol. Aesthet. Creativity, Arts 2, 68–85.
Simonton, D.K., 2003. Expertise, competence, and creative ability: the perplexing complexities. In: Sternberg, R.J., Grigorenko, E.L. (Eds.), The Psychology of Abilities, Compe-
tencies, and Expertise. Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 213–239.
Weinstein, E.C., Clark, Z., DiBartolomeo, D.J., Davis, K., 2014. A decline in creativity? It depends on the domain. Creativity research journal 26, 174–184.
Further Reading
Amabile, T.M., 1982. Children’s artistic creativity: detrimental effects of competition in a field setting. Personality Soc. Psychol. Bull. 8 (3).
Amabile, T.M., 1996. Growing up Creative: Nurturing a Lifetime of Creativity, second ed. Creative Education Foundation.
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Barbot, B., Lubart, T.I., Besançon, M., 2016. “Peaks, Slumps, and Bumps”: Individual Differences in the Development of Creativity in Children and Adolescents. In: New directions
for Child and Adolescent Development, vol. 2016, pp. 33–45.
Beghetto, R.A., Kaufman, J.C., 2007. Toward a broader conception of creativity: a case for "mini-c" creativity. Psychol. Aesthet. Creativity Arts 1,73–79.
Kim, K.H., 2011. The creativity crisis: the decrease in creative thinking scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Creativity Res. J. 23, 285–295.
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