Modeling Creativity Project
Creativity is the cognitive ability to produce original and useful outcomes (e.g. ideas, insights or products). In a rapidly changing world, creative minds become indispensable. Therefore, the measurement of creativity becomes more and more important for both researchers and businesses.
The modeling creativity project aims to combine different research projects on creativity, funded by the Creative Mind Prize (2016), the ABBAS foundation and the Jacobs Foundation.
Jacobs Foundation Fellowship
The main focus of my research during the fellowship is on how creativity develops and prospers from childhood to adulthood. Creativity is crucial for medical breakthroughs, awe-inspiring art, and technical innovations. Although creativity has been studied extensively, no theory or model explains how creativity develops. The end goal of this project is to create a developmental model of creativity that explains developmental phenomena, predicts unknown phenomena, identifies developmental mechanisms, and provides insights on when and how to intervene. This project tackles this feat by (1) creating a playful adaptive learning environment to reliably assess creativity development over time, (2) determining which developmental phenomena in creativity can be replicated, and then (3) deriving a formal developmental model of creativity.
The results of this project will create reliable measures of creative ability for ecologically valid longitudinal assessment in school settings, construct a comprehensive picture of ‘developmental milestones’ in creativity and ‘windows of opportunity’ to foster its growth, provide a testable model of creativity development that can steer future research, and perhaps most importantly, an adaptive learning environment covering a broad range of content that can be used daily by children to playfully develop their creative thinking skills.
Creative Mind Prize 2016
The ABC Creative Mind Prize is an award presented to a young academic with an original and exciting research proposal that centres around the aspects of creativity, cognition and/or the workings of the human brain. In 2016, dr. Claire Stevenson had the honour to win this award in order to conduct research in mathematical models of creativity. More information on the mathematical models projects can be found under the “Projects” heading on the current website.
ABBAS foundation (AUT database)
Divergent thinking tasks are widely used in scientific research into creativity but are characterized by a large number of measurement problems. In order to determine the creative potential of employees for selection purposes and for scientific research into creativity, it is important that creativity is measured with a valid and reliable test.
The aim of this project is to develop a psychometrically responsible divergent thinking task that can be used for selection and scientific research into creativity. More information can be found under the heading “AUT database”.