Creative Thinking

        Creative Thinking

     Thinking is one of the important aspects of one’s cognitive behavior. When viewed from a close psychological angle, the psychological activities like recollection, imagination and perfection is infact thinking. According to garrett “Thinking is behaviour which is often implicit and hidden and in which symbols like images, ideas, concepts are ordinarily employed.

TYPES OF THINKING

1.                 Perceptual or concrete thinking.

It is the simplest form of thinking. The basis of this type of thinking is perception perception is defined as the process of interpretation of sensation according to one’s experience.

2.                 Conceptual or abstract thinking

It does not require the perfection of actual objects or events. It is an abstract thinking where one makes uses of concepts, the generalized idea.

3.                 Reflective thinking.

It is a higher form of thinking. It aims at solving complex problems rather than simple problems. There is an insightful cognitive approach in reflective thinking.

4.                 Creative thinking.

This aims at creating something new. The individual himself fomulates the problem and he is free to collect evidence and invent tools for its solution. The thinking of scientists or inventors is an example of creative thinking.

Creativity is considered to be a greatest asset of mankind. Philosophically, a creative thinker is one whose thinking leads to a result which confirms to criteria of value in one domain or another.

Psychologists related creativity with mental health while some others with personality development and psycho analyst like Freud restricted creativity to an interplay of unconscious and conscious mind.

DEFINITIONS

According to Spearman, “Creature thinking is the power of the human mind to create new contents by transferring relations and thereby generating new correlates”.

According to Guilford, “Creative thinking is a form of thought that is divergent”.

COMPONENTS OF CREATIVE THINKING

There are five components of creative thinking.

1.                 The act

The creative act cannot be described but that is hypothesized as unknowable until it occurs. Creativity comes up when we arrange our thoughts in such a way that leads readily to a different understanding of a situation.

2.                 The Process

The creative process is the emergence in action of a novel relational products, resulting out of the uniqueness of the person.

Graham Wallas identified 4 main stages to describe the creative process.

(a)   Preparation

It is the period of accumulating necessary factual knowledge, skills or basic ideas,

(b).  Incubation

This is the stage of relaxation turning attention away from the problem.

(c)              Illumination

It is marked with the sudden realization of the meaningful material and accompany the appearance of insight.

(d)             Verification

The solution of the problem is tested and refined is known as verification.

3.                 The object

The creativity is the object which generally referred to as the product and the product should be original. The originality is associated with four characteristics :  Novelty, impracticability, uniqueness and surprise.

4.                 The environment

Environment is the condition of openness which facilitate the creative persona to move from the actual state of affairs towards the solution of the problem.

NATURE OF CREATIVE THINKING

1.                               It is not a single dimension of personality but it is made up of a number of traits.

2.                               It is a God give gift and innate endowment.

3.                               It is universal

4.                               It is innate as well as acquired.

5.                               It carries ego involvement.

6.                               It rests more on divergent thinking not closed thinking.

7.                               It is not completely spontaneous.

8.                               It is the ability to synthesis ideas or objects.

9.                               It is the ability to create new ideas, theories or objects.

10.                          It is the ability to develop something original.

11.                          It is a process as well as product.

12.                          It is a complex, dynamic and serious process.

13.                          It is the capacity to accept challenge.

14.                          It is the freedom to exercise choice.

15.                          It is the readiness to change self and environment.

CHARACTERISTICS OF CREATURE PERSONALITY

1.                               Courageous in conviction (Strong conviction in his belief and values)

2.                               Curiosity

3.                               Independent behaviour (in judgement)

4.                               Independent thinking (to solve problems)

5.                               Busy in doing tasks (never leaves anything incomplete)

6.                               Intuition.

7.                               Unwilling to accept routine solution.

8.                               High achievement motivation

9.                               Willing to take risks.

10.                          Visionary (vision of future problems)

11.                          Adventurous.

12.                          Flexible in his thinking, feeling and doing.

13.                          Self disciplined

14.                          Foresight

15.                          Good memory and intelligence.

LEVELS OF CREATIVITY

Taylor suggested 5 levels of creativity.

1.                           Expressive creativity

It involves independent expression having originality in its essence.

2.                           Productive creativity

It is mostly involved in artistic or scientific products.

3.                           Inventive creativity

The inventors, explorers and discoverers are the example of this type.

4.                           Innovative Creativity

It is based upon highly developed abstract conceptualising

skills.

5.                           Emergent creativity

This is the highest level of creativity. It is the ability which

absorbs commonly provided experience and produce something unique.

Trails of creativity

J.P. Guilford made the distinction between two types of

thinking abilities one leading to intelligence ie, convergent thinking and another leads to creativity is called a divergent thinking.

Guilford mentioned two types of traits

I        Aptitude Traits

These are primary traits which are related to creativity.

(a)        Sensitivity to problem

It is an ability that is reflected  in a person’s detecting something which is missing or lacking in a given situation.

(b)       Fluency

It is a quantitative aspects of creativity, coming up with a large quantity of idea, words and ways of expressing them. There are four factors associated with it.

i)           Word fluency

It is an ability to express words having a specific letter or combination of words

ii)         Associative fluency

This ability requires for generating associations or relation, production of analogies or similarities

iii)      Expressional fluency

This involves the production of phrases or sentences.

iv)      Ideational fluency

This involves production of ideas.

c)        Flexibility of Thinking

It means to think up a variety of idea and new ways of dealing with situations. It express how a person responds in different ways to a situations.

d)       Originality

Ability to generate unique but appropriate ideas, solutions, alternatives, designs etc.

e)        Redefinition

Ability to restate problems or situations in fresh ways.

f)         Elaboration

Ability to develop fully the potential of an idea or an insight developmental and planning ability.

II) Non Aptitude Traits.

The traits of motivation and temperament are said to have determining effects up on creative performance.

THEORIES OF CREATIVE PERFORMANCE

1.      Divine inspiration Theory

Most of the creative persons like poets have often experienced that there is some invisible power that makes them to create something new.

2.      Accidental Theory

Much of the creativity is the result of accident or chance.

3.      Psychoanalytic theory of Personality.

a)       Sigmand Freud, the father of Psychoanalysis was the first who attempted to analyse the process of creativity. He lays that creativity owes its origin to conflict with in the unconscious mind.

b)       Compensatory theory.

Adler is the exponent of this theory. According to him, human beings produce art, science and other aspects of creative performance to compensate for their own inadequacies.

c)        Jung viewed creativity at two levels.

a)       The psychological mode

In this, the content is mainly derived from the domain of human consciousness in relation to family, environment, society etc.

b)       Visionary mode

Here the content is derived from the timeless depth which Jung called the collective unconscious.

4.      Humanistic Theory or Motivational Theory.

According to Maslow, creativity is a maximum of self actualizing. Self actualizing people are highly motivated and unfrightened by the unknown and the puzzling.

5.      Behaviouristic Theory or association theory

According to this theory, each creativity results from unusual association of demands with in to new contributions in some useful way.

6.      Cognitive Theory

Cognitive psychologists assume  that an individuals behaviour is always based on cognition, the act of knowing about the situation where the behaviour occurs.

MEASUREMENT OF CREATIVITY

Types of creativity tests.

1. Torrance test of creative thinking 2. Guilford’s divergent thinking instruments.

3.      Minnesota tests of creative thinking.

4.      Mednrick’s Remote Association test.

5.      Wallach and Kogan creativity instruments.

6.      Passi’s battery of creativity test.

7.      Baquer Mehanid test of creativity

Role of school and the teachers in the promotion of creativity in children

1. Identification of the creative child

(a)        Word association tests

( give as many definition and number of categories )

(b)       Use of things test

( many uses of a common object )

(c)        Hidden shapes test

( find more complex form of figure )

(d)       Three different endings

( to incomplete short fables )

(e)        Make up problems

( as many mathematical problems on the basis of given information)

2. Factors in the school that hidden creativity

1.      Avoid punishing so hard.

2.      Avoid freezing the child in to safe way of performing task.

3.      Authoritarian attitude of teachers.

4.      Threats and ridicules that injure the feelings of students.

5.      Inflexible defence mechanism

6.      Teacher’s demand for right answers create obstacle for creativity.

III STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPING CREATIVITY

a) Brain storming strategy

Alex Osborm (1957) developed this method. It is a technique in which problem is attacked from all possible angles to generate a large number of ideas in order to arrive at the best solution. In this method

(i)           Students are encouraged to suggest as many ideas as possible.

(ii)         Students are allowed the freedom to express their ideas.

(iii)      Student’s ideas should not be criticized

(iv)      Students may be encouraged to build new ideas on the basis of ideas already suggested by the fellow students.

(v)         Encourage wild ideas.

(vi)      Avoid ownership of ideas.

(b) Inquiry training.

This model was developed by Richard Suchman (196) to teach students a process of investigating and explaining unusual social

phenomenon.

c)        Attribute listing

This technique was developed in 1954 by Robert Platt Crawford, In this, the attempt is made first to test the basic but modifiable attributes or properties or specification of a particular object or activity, after that an attempt is made to search for alternative to present attribute. This is a kind of search for a better method of solving human problems.

d)       Morphological analysis (developed by Fred Zincky (1957)

This is a variant of attribute listing. In this the basis is to identity the critical modifiable attributes and listing several attributes for each of the attributes enable one to generate a very large number of alternatives of an object or an activity.

e)        Synectics

Gordon (1960) is the originator of this method. It is defined as the mental  activity in problem solving in order to arrive at solutions of fundamental novelty.

IV Providing creative Learning Environment and experiences in the classroom.

Following guidelines are offered for the teachers for

the promotion of creativity in children.

1)      Inspire the  students to learn to disagree constructively

2)      Inspire the students to emulate creative persons.

3)      Provide a safe, permissive and warm environment.

4)      Provide for existing experiences to the students.

5)      Develop students ideas through  constructive  criticism.

6)      Provide necessary guidance and counselling for overcoming emotional fears.

7)      Allow the students to ask unusual questions.

8)      Show consideration to imaginative and unusual ideas of the students.

9)      Provide freedom to respond

10.      Give opportunity for ego involvement.

11.      Encourage originality and flexibility (using it in different situation)

12.      Making maximum use of the resources of the community.

13.      Develop healthy habits like, self reliance, self confidence, persistence, industriousness etc.

14.      Intellectual fluency.

15.      Accept and encourage divergent thinking.

16.      Encourage students to trust their own judgement.

17.      Be a stimulus for creative thinking

18.      Develop curiosity

19.      Active participation

20.      Encourage to be adventurous.

21.      Provide opportunities for self initiated learning.

22.      Provide materials which develop imagination of the students.

23.      Ask challenging and provocated questions.

24.      Praise rather than punish

25.      Love them and let them know it.

26.      Encourage them to do intensive and extensive reading

27.      Arrange lectures of creative personalities.

28.      Encourage students for self evaluation

29.      Follow brain storming strategies.

30.      Exhibit role models and students will imitate the teacher’s critical and creative behaviour.

ROLE OF HOME IN THE PROMOTION OF CREATIVITY

The home environment greatly influences the creativity aspect. Too much love and too much fear will not promote creativity. Children should be permitted to ask questions freely. Appropriate type of reading materials may be made available to children.

CONCLUSION

The cultural, scientific and the social progress of any country depends on the extent of the development of creativity among its citizens. No nation can afford to overlook or ignore the significance of creativity in this age of competition. Creative acts not only affect scientific and technological progress but also  society in general. It is the responsibility of each nation to identify such talent and encourage and develop creative potential among the students. Like other qualities creative  ideas need  to be nurtured.

So right from the beginning of a  child’s education, he should experience the joy of discovery.