How to promote divergent thinking?

Divergent thinking is mostly found among people who are curious, willing to take risks and persistent.

Divergent thinking can be cultivated through training alone and these attitudes linger for several weeks after the training is completed.

The most used divergent thinking norms are those of brainstorming: quantity of ideas is wanted, defer evaluation or judgment of ideas till after the session, wild ideas are welcome, combination and improvement of ideas is sought.

Scenario writing also can promote divergent thinking: it can be taught to use the person imaginations to picture some other person going about achieving the chosen goal.

Other values that promote divergent thinking are those that are frequently quoted as values that promote creativity.

With regard to creativity training, two types of materials stood out: lecture and case-based materials. Both of these techniques were effective for promoting general creativity but also for divergent thinking, problem-solving, performance and attitudes towards creativity.
How to promote divergent thinking?

Creativity in childhood

Studies of creativity in children have primarily dealt with the process of creative development. Creativity is a complex or syndrome with certain traits or tendencies and some of these may allow for children’s creativity whereas others may prelude them.

Study (Getzels and Jackson 1962) shows that personality measures suggested that the creative children showed more freedom, originality, humor, violence and playfulness than the high IQ children. Their work suggests that in many cases children who are highly creative have IQs considerably below the average for their peers.

Perhaps, the high-IQ children were more success-oriented and received more approval from teachers. Compared with their less creative peers, creative children also engage in more fantasy or pretend play in interaction with other children.

The concepts of imagination, originality, giftedness and curiosity have been studied and in many cases have been equated with creativity. They are spontaneous, uninhibited and often mindful.

Possibly parents contributes to such creative tendencies, for parents of creative children and adolescents tend to accept their children as they are and granted them a good deal of freedom to explore new possibilities on their own.
Creativity in childhood

Definition of creative thinking

Thinking most generally, any covert cognitive or mental manipulation of ideas, images, symbols, words, propositions, memories, concepts, precepts, beliefs or intentions. Creative thinking is imaginative thinking directed toward innovation. It is based on questions that ask ‘what if’, ‘why’ and ‘why not’; how and how else.

It is the multi-dimensional set of components that lead an individual or a group to the generation of new ideas that have values. It should be noted that the elements of uniqueness of solution and value of results are incorporated into the definition.

Creative thinking is grounded in the consideration of alternatives, possibilities, other ways of imagination and doing things. The key to creative thinking is imagination.

Creative thinking is associated with imagination, innovation, originality, lateral thinking, and divergent thinking.

For a person with some natural creative thinking skills, it naturally occurs even if he or she is not well aware of it.
Definition of creative thinking

What is creativity?

Creativity is a powerful source of growth that is vital throughout life as human continually create and re-create themselves. It is an attitude an activity and philosophy about growing older that owns no age boundaries.

Creativity has many meaning. Creativity is often defined as the ability to produce novel responses or works. Moreover it is enough for these products to be outlandish: they must in some way appropriate in context or valued by other.

Howard Gardner in 1997 has described creativity as ‘the ability to solve problems and fashion products and to raise new questions’, while Bill Lucas in 2001 says that it is ‘a state of mind in which all out intelligences are working together’.

Rollo May’s in 1975 definition that creativity is ‘the process of bringing something new into being’ is both simple and encomspssing.

In structured-of-intellect model J.P. Guilford in 1967, captured the idea of creativity by proposing that it involves divergent thinking rather than convergent thinking.
What is creativity?

Creativity and divergent thinking

Creativity is a distinct aspect of intellectual functioning which is for all practical purpose independent of conventional intelligence, was subscribe by Guilford (1950), Torrance (1962), Taylor (1964), Wallach and Kogan (1965). They have claimed that creativity and intelligence are two distinct mental abilities each involving a special cluster of skills.

The quest to quantify the creative process, primarily through the use of divergent thinking batteries, has been a lightning rod for the psychometric study of creativity.

Divergent thinking tests require individuals to produce several response to a specific prompt, in sharp contrast to most standardized tests of achievement or ability that require one correct answer.

Getzels and Jackson (1962) gave more than 500 students, in grades 6 to 12, intelligence tests and five creativity tests:
*A word-association test in which students were asked to give as many definitions as possible for fairly common words.
 
*A test of alternate uses, in which students were asked to think of as many uses as they could for familiar object.

*A hidden-shapes test that required them to find geometric figures hidden in more complex figures.

*A fable test in which they furnished the last line for an unfinished fable.

*A make-up problems test in which they were to make up a variety of mathematical problems from large amount of numerical information.

Scores in these creativity measures and scores in IQ tests correlated very little. Thus creativity seems to be largely independent of general intelligence as defined by IQ tests.

At the same time, highly creative people rarely have below-average required for creativity. Among people with above-average IQ, an individual’s IQ scores cannot predict his or her level of creativity.

Getzels and Jackson changes the dominant views of the relationship between IQ and creativity by postulating, based on their extensive study that creativity was far more independent of IQ than previously believed especially at the upper-IQ levels. This work paved way for the development of modern creativity.
Creativity and divergent thinking

Creativity

Creativity
Creativity may be more important than IQ in allowing a Michelangelo or a Mozart to break new ground.

But what is creativity and what do we know about creativity over the life span?

Defining creativity had provoked as much contr0versy as defining intelligence.

However, creativity is often defined as the ability to produce more responses or works.

Moreover, it is enough for these products to be outlandish; they must in some way be appropriate in context or valued by others.

In structure of intellect-model, the expert captured the idea of creativity by proposing that it involves divergent thinking.

Divergent thinking requires coming up with variety of ideas or solutions to a problem when there is no one right answer.

Indeed, the most common measure of creativity, at least in children, is what is called ideational fluency – the sheer number of different, including novel, ideas that one can generate when asked.
Creativity