Creativity Can Be Nurtured

Creativity has a reputation as the unteachable talent — you have the spark or you do not. The research tradition that has actually measured creative thinking for seventy years disagrees, and so does the study of what environments do to it.

Measuring the allegedly unmeasurable

E. Paul Torrance built the most widely used tests of creative thinking — fluency, flexibility, originality, elaboration — and longitudinal follow-ups of his participants found childhood creative-thinking scores predicted adult creative achievement, in some analyses beyond IQ. Whatever the tests capture, it is real, it varies, and — the practical point — it responds to conditions. Kim’s analysis (2011) of decades of American norms found creative-thinking scores declining since 1990, particularly among younger children, even as IQ-type scores rose: whatever we started doing to childhood, elaboration and originality paid for it.

What environments do

Amabile’s programme of research locates the levers. Creativity thrives on intrinsic motivation — the task done for its own interest — and is measurably suppressed by surveillance, expected evaluation, restricted choice and rewards contingent on producing “creative” output. In classrooms this translates uncomfortably: constant assessment of every product is a creativity suppressant, however gently administered. The productive pattern separates generation from judgement — real freedom in the middle of a task, honest critique at its defined end.

Building creative capacity

The teachable components are unglamorous: deep domain knowledge (original combinations require material to combine); tools of the field, taught as Renzulli’s Type II enrichment; genuine problems with more than one respectable answer; and drafting culture, where the first version is expected to be wrong. Add protected low-stakes space — the sketchbook, the notebook, the prototype — and the alleged spark turns out to be a practice.

Creative work is one of the evidence streams our system values by design — real products, drafted and reviewed: the Talent Framework.

References

Kim, K. H. (2011). The creativity crisis: The decrease in creative thinking scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Creativity Research Journal, 23(4), 285–295.
Amabile, T. M. (1996). Creativity in Context. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Torrance, E. P. (1974). Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Bensenville, IL: Scholastic Testing Service.