Education Shortform
Creativity and Education
In a nutshell…
It’s fair to say that creativity is considered important throughout education. It’s sometimes referred to as one of the ‘4 Cs of 21st Century skills’.
While hard to define, creativity can be seen as making (creating) something that is both new and useful. Often this means putting existing elements together in a new way, or putting something to a new use.
This is reflected in tests of creativity such as Guilford’s multiple uses test, where people are asked to think of as many uses as they can for an everyday object such as a brick.
Creativity is sometimes viewed in very different terms to other cognitive processes such as memory and attention. In my view, however, creativity is certainly a cognitive process (or set of processes). It’s something our minds do.
And we can only be creative by using existing knowledge and skills, and by engaging in problem solving when faced with new challenges.
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This is one of a series of shortform education articles. You can download a simplified summary of my ‘A–Z of Educational concepts’ here.
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