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What's shocking is how incredibly well Torrance's creativity index predicted those kids' creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance's tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance's data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

But how is creative or critical thought defined and taught? And by what assessment can we measure it, if at all?

Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking.  Given that students may lose interest in what they're learning as a result of grades, it makes sense that they're also apt to think less deeply.  One series of studies, for example, found that students given numerical grades were significantly less creative than those who received qualitative feedback but no grades.  The more the task required creative thinking, in fact, the worse the performance of students who knew they were going to be graded.  Providing students with comments in addition to a grade didn't help:  the highest achievement occurred only when comments were given instead of numerical scores (Butler, 1987; Butler, 1988; Butler and Nisan, 1986).

The spurious nature of grading seems particularly true in the case of writing. Most any piece of writing can, and often does, receive any grade.

a practical how to attribute Creative Commons licensed material.

Basically, creative commons licensing provides the creator with a way from an "all rights reserved" model to a "some rights reserved" model on copyrighted material.

As a creative author - professional or aspiring - the web can be a wonderful place. Below are some of the best and most inspiring places a word doctor can go.

America faces a crisis in higher learning. Too many college graduates are not prepared to think critically and creatively, speak and write cogently and clearly, solve problems, comprehend complex issues, accept responsibility and accountability, take the perspective of others, or meet the expectations of employers. 

Steven Johnson talks about creativity.

Link thrown out during an Edfutures podcast

creative critical thinking

This guy has some very interesting thoughts, but can teachers really afford to follow some of his advice??  

His sense of audience is ridiculous. I'm all about creativity, even in academic writing. My students have a variety of creative opportunities, but the fact remains that they need to learn how to put thoughts together effectively. I just looked at two essays that had absolutely no coherent point, even though they featured personal experiences. He made a comparison between essays and novels. Dude! They are two completely different forms of writing. They have different goals and different parameters. Yes, the 5-paragraph essay is a stilted, inauthentic form of writing and it is largely on its way out, but at the secondary level, it is the training wheels some students need to learn how to organize their thoughts coherently. No matter how they write, they still have to say SOMETHING.

He does exaggerate for effect, e.g. his claim that students are told to write in a style similar to classic literature--ridiculous! No one is told to copy any writing style previous to 1950, unless it is graduate students being told to mimic the horrible jargon of academic journals, but I think that's a different "bad" than what he means here. He avoids what should be his real topic--truly bad writing; I mean incompetent, to the point of being an effort to follow, poorly structured writing. We see this writing from the strongest cases of ESL students and from students who seem to have skipped several grades in school or who have never read a great deal in their school years. He leaves off the most important tool for teaching writing, and that is frequency. Anyone who only writes by email, Facebook, and twitter, and only writes something for a class once or twice a semester, will never break into a "conversational" form of writing (with complete sentences and paragraphs) that will be recognized as literate, normal, and natural. We recommend starting with short, non-graded writing and, by writing 2-3 times a week, working up to something more substantial. If teachers can do that, then college student writing will improve, but the plan requires patience and consistency from the teacher.

I opted to have students use Google Sites to create their portfolios, for several reasons. Students were already using Google Documents for their essays, so the interface was reasonably familiar to them. Google Documents integrates well with Google Sites, so it was very easy for students to embed their essays in their portfolios. Google Sites allows for easy customization, for any student who might want to get creative with site design. Using Google Sites along with Google Documents makes it very easy for students to control who's allowed to see what.

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1, is a collection of Creative Commons licensed essays for use in the first year writing classroom, all written by writing teachers for students.

At one level we all know what "critical thinking" means - it means good thinking, almost the opposite of illogical, irrational, thinking. But when we test our understanding further, we run into questions. For example, is critical thinking the same as creative thinking, are they different, or is one part of the other? How do critical thinking and native intelligence or scholastic aptitude relate? Does critical thinking focus on the subject matter or content that you know or on the process you use when you reason about that content?

How the Web inspires creativity and innovation.

Pablo Picasso once declared: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." Well, something similar can be said about scientists. According to a new study in Cognition led by Claire Cook at MIT, every child is a natural scientist. The problem is how to remain a scientist once we grow up.

The internationally recognized series of  Horizon Reports is part of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project, a comprehensive research venture established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years on a variety of sectors around the globe. This volume, the  2011 Horizon Report, examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. It is the eighth in the annual series of reports focused on emerging technology in the higher education environment. 

I think the writers' workshop is an appropriate model for academics who want to make their manuscripts better. Creative writers have been "workshopping" each other's stuff for a long time. The workshop model can lead to tears, to bruised egos, and, occasionally, to black eyes. But the right group can produce better work.

Currently, we have a mass production model of education. But until we personalize things and require each student to learn. Until we do things in creative ways that make sure kids each learn and have to think and process, we will continue to have the select few do the thinking. It is human nature. Education shouldn't be one size fits all. I don't think that getting outside the standardized work we do in education should be considered jailbreaking. But for now, in most schools it is.

This site might be helpful to those of us who are using and/or modifying others' works in our own publications.