D. Miazza, R. Pazzaglia, M.A. ZanettiDepartment of PsychologyUniversity of Pavia- ITALY

CREATIVE HORIZONS:

PEERS RELATIONS IN BUILDING DIVERGENT THOUGHT

• Is creativity a gift for a single child or for all the

class of children?

• Why and how the development of creativity in the classroom must be promoted?

Questions and overview

• Divergent thought, creativity and beliefs: is there any relation?

Is creativity only a gift?

1. can the creative and intellectual capacities increase, or these capacities are just a immutable “gift”?

2. implicit theory: is creativity, like intelligence, static or no-static entity? (Dweck, 2000).

It is important to understand how personal beliefs, implicit theories, learning goals , the attributive style can influence the real performance, individually and in group, specially in difficult tasks.

The development of a shared type of creativity in classroom

• Creativity is a resource to favour a learning that implies a personal and collective re-elaboration of every matter or experience.

• These processes allows the students to restructure together problematic situations as well, observing them from different and more original points of view .

• Creativity represents an essential factor for the well-being of the children and learning environment (Zanetti, 2004).

Can we hypothesise a sensitive period of creativity?

Gardner (1993), multiple intelligence and the "literal phase“:

the influence of conventional models

the role of the adult (attachment)

the development of creative abilities as the result of Situated Learning (McLellan, 1996)

Role of cooperative learning in childhood (Johnson and Johnson, 2000)

Creativity can be increased involving all the symbolic systems (individually and in group)

With a specific training (suited for gifted children) it is possible to increase and support general creative abilities of non-gifted children.

The classroom becomes the contex that allows the development of all abilities.

Goal

Subjects

Instruments and Methods

65 children:

28 of the experimental group

37 of the control group

-  Test S.R. 4-5 School Readiness (linguistic ability, phonological, ability, logical ability, ability to use symbols), Zanetti, Miazza, 2002

- Test TCD of creativity and Divergent thought, Williams,1993

-  Specific training (Training dance, movement and music and

Creativity Training)

Results 1

The results showed the positive influence of the training (test- t: p<.001) on the development of the creative abilities, for all the cognitive-intellectual factors of the creativity in the experimental group

• originality factors

• ability to create creative titles

• perception of the imaginative and creative potential

• curiosity, to take on risks, complexity, availability, ecc.

Results 2Graf. 1 William's test

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

FLESS.1 FLESS.2 ORIGIN.1 ORIGIN.2 ELABOR.A TITOLI A CURIOSITY COMPLEX.

Creativity categories

Mea

ns

EXPER.GRCONTR.GR

The analysis of the variance (Graf.1) demonstrates that there is an important difference between the two groups, that involves almost all the factors of creativity (Flessibility 1, F 9,67, glb 64, p<.005; Flessibilità 2, F21,83, glb 64, p<.001; Originality 1 F37,05, glb 64, p<.001; Originality 2 F9,29 glb 64, p<.001; Elaboration F 14,08, glb 64, p<.001; Title 1 f18,54, glb 64, p<.001; Curisosity F 16,03, glb 64, p<.001; Complexity F 6,60 glb 64, p<.05).

Conclusions• To stimulate the creative potential in the children group, it is necessary to consider not only intellectual peculiarities of the single child but and also the role of peers relations. • Supporting the development of divergent pattern, it is also possible to develop more different symbolic universes, shared by the group.• Creativity training can be an important way to transform the multiple potentialities of the single child into real abilities and put them in practice in the group activities.