Arizona Education Network

 

A recent Newsweek article titled “The Creativity Crisis” reported on a William & Mary study by Kyung Hee Kimon showing that creativity in American children is decreasing.  The study showed that up until 1990, creativity, the bedrock of American economic innovation, had increased with every generation.  According to study, which analyzed almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults, creativity scores have declined since 1990.

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The decline in creativity has  implications for the education reform movement in the United States.  The emphasis on standardized testing and “back to basics” curriculum may be undermining the creativity of American students.  When Indiana University Professor Jonathan Plucker recently visited China, he identified for faculty of a major Chinese university prominent trends in American education, which included our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing.

“‘After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

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The in-depth article is a comprehensive look at various scientific studies evaluating the ability of the brain to learn creativity, as well as schools taking novel approaches to integrating creativity into the classroom.   According to the article, teaching students to be creative goes beyond art classes, and the development of creativity is a process that evolves from the preschooler who asks “why” to around the age of 9 or 10, where creativity seems to evaporate.

As school stuffs more complex information into their heads, kids get overloaded, and creativity suffers.

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To read more about the creativity crisis, visit:

The Creativity Crisis, Newsweek Magazine, June 10, 2010

Creativity Test: Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (1962), Indiana University

Tags: education accountability and reform

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 11th, 2010 at 6:04 AM and is filed under Education Reform and Best Practices, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.