The digging deeper into ideas category includes cognitive characteristics commonly referred to as convergent thinking or critical thinking. The characteristics in this category include:
analyzing
synthesizing
reorganizing or redefining
evaluating
seeing relationships
desiring to resolve ambiguity or bringing order to disorder
preferring complexity or understanding complexity.
This category is based on the notion that creative productive thinking also depends on analyzing and focusing ideas. Choosing the most promising ideas to work on and develop that will lead to a practical but novel outcome, involves sorting and evaluating or bringing promising ideas under the microscope for closer examination. It has been said that taming a wild idea is easier than thinking up a mediocre one.
This kind of creative productive thinking involves building up ideas and not discarding them. We often refer to the characteristics associated with digging deeper into ideas as higher-level thinking abilities. People exhibit these characteristics by looking beyond the obvious to perceive gaps, paradoxes, needs, or missing elements.
You might observe them engaging in:
Refining developing and strengthening intriguing possibilities.
Setting priorities, sorting, arranging, and categorizing ideas.
Examining ideas using a constructive approach rather than a destructive approach.
Focusing on how to strengthen or build up ideas by analyzing possibilities in balanced and forward-thinking ways.
In other words, people with these characteristics are improvement motivated. Digging deeper into ideas allows them to decide, evaluate, choose, and develop promising options into creatively productive outcomes.
This category involves the thinking that leads to doing. The characteristics described by this category involve assessing higher-level thinking processes. These critical thinking abilities may also contribute to creativity and include the skills used to focus ideas, such as:
sorting, evaluating, or prioritizing options
developing and using criteria
strengthening or improving ideas
selecting the most promising ideas leading to outcomes that are both original and practical.
This category also involves assessing one's response to ambiguous or paradoxical situations or tasks or one's proficiency in defining relationships or categories when given complex data or tasks.
Tests designed to measure critical thinking, higher-level thinking, or analytic reasoning would be appropriate choices.
Assessment of these characteristics might also involve the collection of performance data evolving from structured tasks, as well as rating scales or portfolio evaluations.
Self-reports that include items focused on the individual's ability to resolve ambiguity, motivation to bring order to disorder, or preference for complexity may also be useful.
Rating scales completed by parents, teachers, or other evaluators for this category might include items describing the person's ability to make effective choices or decisions or to handle complex ambiguous tasks.