Interest in creativity among educators and psychologists is usually thought to have its roots in the mid-20th Century. In 1950, J.P. Guilford, President of the American Psychological Association, stated in his presidential address that the topic of creativity deserved greater attention. Following this call to action, psychological research on creativity expanded significantly. That address, along with the pioneering efforts of several other leaders at about the same time, provided the foundation that has influenced more than six decades of theory, research, and practice. Many definitions of creativity have been put forward since then, but because creativity is complex and multifaceted in nature, there is no single, universally accepted definition.
Even though different theorists, researchers, or educators may use the term creativity, they may be referring to very different constructs. The definition you adopt will determine the factors or characteristics you consider to be essential to understanding and finding evidence about creativity within an individual.
Below are various views of creativity by a number of creativity theorists to provide some scope to the range of different constructs and the multi-faceted nature of this subject:
Involves an interaction of three components: domain-relevant skills, creativity-relevant skills, and task motivation.
Domain-Relevant Skills include knowledge about the domain, technical skills, and special domain-related talent.
Creativity-Relevant Skills include working styles, thinking styles, and personality traits.
The Task Motivation dimension involves the desire to do something for its own sake or based on the interest in the activity by a particular person at a particular point in time.
The ability to see (or to be aware) and to respond. The creative attitude requires the capacity to be puzzled, the ability to concentrate, the ability to experience oneself as the initiator of ideas and actions, and the ability to accept, rather than to avoid, conflict or tension. Creativity involves the willingness to be born every day.
One who regularly solves problems, fashions products, or defines new questions in a domain in a way that is initially considered novel but that ultimately becomes accepted in a particular cultural setting.
Emphasizes the use of metaphor and analogy for "connection-making,” coining the Greek word synectics, which refers to the joining together of different and apparently irrelevant elements. The synectics approach holds that people can increase markedly their ability to make creative connections if they understand and use metaphoric thinking deliberately. The synectics approach involves seeking and using direct, personal, and symbolic analogies to find new solutions to problems.
Emphasized that problem-solving and creative thinking are closely related in that creative thinking produces novel outcomes, and problem-solving involves producing a new response to a new situation, which is a novel outcome. Guilford emphasized: sensitivity to problems, fluency, flexibility, novelty, synthesis, reorganization or redefinition, complexity, and evaluation. In Guilford’s Structure of Intellect, Model creativity has usually been associated with the mental operation described as divergent production.
Emphasized that creative responses must be both novel and adaptive to reality (i.e. useful) and found that creative people were frequently characterized by inventiveness, individuality, independence, enthusiasm, determination, and industry. Highly creative people were self-confident and self-accepting and could address both their personal strengths and limitations openly and honestly. They were also able to deal with ambiguity and lack of closure.
Emphasizes the importance of self-actualization in human behavior. In general, Maslow held that many people are afraid to learn too much about themselves, and thus never become self-actualized. Creative people are able to overcome those fears and the rigid pressures of society, and are thus able to free themselves to attain personal integration, wholeness, and creativity. Creative, self-actualizing people were described by Maslow as bold, courageous, autonomous, spontaneous, and confident. Creativity in Maslow's view is as much concerned with people and the way they deal with their daily lives as it is with impressive products.
Involves the process by which ideas already in one's mind are associated in unusual but original ways to form new ideas. He emphasized the need to dig deeply into one's associative structure, probing beyond obvious connections, to find the novel or remote associative linkages among ideas out of which original solutions are formed. For Mednick, then, creativity involves combining mutually remote associations in an original and useful way.
Proposed that it is essential to consider four factors in a multifaceted conception of creativity:
person (personality characteristics or traits of creative people)
process (elements of motivation, perception, learning, thinking, and communicating)
product (ideas translated into tangible forms)
press (the relationship between human beings and their environment).
Emphasized three major “inner conditions” of the creative person:
an openness to experience that prohibits rigidity
ability to use one's personal standards to evaluate situations
ability to accept the unstable and to experiment with many possibilities
Arguably the person whose work is most widely associated with creativity testing defined creativity as the -a process of becoming sensitive to problems, deficiencies, gaps in knowledge, missing elements, disharmonies, and so on; identifying the difficulty; searching for solutions, making guesses, or formulating hypotheses about the deficiencies; testing and retesting these hypotheses and possibly modifying and retesting them, and finally communicating the results.
Emphasized the importance of harmony or balance between creative and critical thinking during effective problem solving and decision-making. Creative thinking involves, -encountering gaps, paradoxes, opportunities, challenges, or concerns, and then searching for meaningful new connections by generating many possibilities, varied possibilities (from different viewpoints or perspectives), unusual or original possibilities, and details to expand or enrich possibilities. Critical thinking involves -examining possibilities carefully, fairly, and constructively, and then focusing thoughts and actions by organizing and analyzing possibilities, refining and developing promising possibilities, ranking or prioritizing options, and choosing or deciding on certain options.
Defined four major stages in the creative process:
preparation (detecting a problem and gathering data)
incubation (stepping away from the problem for a period of time)
illumination (a new idea or solution emerges, often unexpectedly)
verification (the new idea or solution is examined or tested)
Creativity can be expressed in a nearly infinite number of ways in human behavior and has its origins in several components of individual and social experience. Your understanding of what creativity means, or your definition of the term, will have a major influence on the characteristics you consider essential to assess and on the kinds of evidence and assessment tools you decide to use.
In addition, I have also provided a synthesis from the articles shared from this site on an overview of creativity in the context of the person, process, and the social environment.