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The Torrance Tests were developed by E. Paul Torrance in the late 1950s, when he was an education professor at the University of Minnesota.

Well, surprise, surprise.  For several decades we as a society have been suppressing children’s freedom to ever-greater extents, and now we find that their creativity is declining.

Creativity is nurtured by freedom and stifled by the continuous monitoring, evaluation, adult-direction, and pressure to conform that restrict children’s lives today.  In the real world few questions have one right answer, few problems have one right solution; that’s why creativity is crucial to success in the real world.  But more and more we are subjecting children to an educational system that assumes one right answer to every question and one correct solution to every problem, a system that punishes children (and their teachers too) for daring to try different routes.  We are also, as I documented in a previous essay, increasingly depriving children of free time outside of school to play, explore, be bored, overcome boredom, fail, overcome failure—that is, to do all that they must do in order to develop their full creative potential.

In the next essay in this series, I will present research evidence that creativity really does bloom in the soil of freedom and die in the hands of overdirective, overprotective, ov

If anything makes Americans stand tall internationally it is creativity.  “American ingenuity” is admired everywhere. We are not the richest country (at least not as measured by smallest percentage in poverty), nor the healthiest (far from it), nor the country whose kids score highest on standardized tests (despite our politicians’ misguided intentions to get us there), but we are the most inventive country.  We are the great innovators, specialists in figuring out new ways of doing things and new things to do. Perhaps this derives from our frontier beginnings, or from our unique form of democracy with its emphasis on individual freedom and respect for nonconformity.  In the business world as well as in academia and the arts and elsewhere, creativity is our number one asset.  In a recent IBM poll, 1,500 CEOs acknowledged this when they identified creativity as the best predictor of future success.[1] 

judgmental teachers and parents.

Students who use assistive technology - Currently, some of the testing tools have compatibility problems with some screen reader technologies. This occasionally results in the screen reader program crashing during an exam. A good practice would be to have a mock exam available for students to try so that they will know ahead of time if their assistive technology will work with your exam. If it does not, an alternate version of the exam will need to be provided

Teach students using a PC to right click on the content they wish to print and choose print. This will allow them to print only the content in that frame.

using color to differentiate between addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems can be very helpful. In learning sequential step problems, highlighting each step in a different color can also overcome this natural difficulty.

What To Avoid With Visual Learners

Rote memorization and drill will not only be mostly impossible for your visual learner, but will also sap his natural love of learning.

Visual learners also tend to “visualize” time passing, so timed quizzes and tests put almost tangible pressure on them, causing unnecessary anxiety

not always be able to “show their work.”

, be prepared for a visual learner to

It is important to help them to understand that their visual learning style is not a disadvantage, but simply a different way of acquiring knowledge

Learn Addition With Counting

internalization and externalization

Interpersonal interaction

Discovery learning:

Spiral Curriculum:

sociocultural constructivists

focusing on the individual cognitive construction of mental structures;

Cognitive constructivists focus on the active mental construction struggling with the conflict between existing personal models of the world, and incoming information in the environment.

According to TIP's

Theory Into Practice

that learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge.

Instruction must be structured so that it can be easily grasped by the student

learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge.

learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge.

Bruner's major theoretical framework is that learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge.