Although recognising multiple creativities as an interdisciplinary and contemporary approach to creativity represents the basic opportunity for future change, the assessment of children's musical creativity is a problematic and insufficiently explored area. The paper discusses the problem of encouraging and assessing the creative musical potential…

As a three-year-old, Margaret Katch told stories about princesses in Vivian Paley's classroom. Now deep into adulthood, she reflects on how acting out these stories as a preschooler influenced her life.

The article aims to study the influence of music and music-calligraphy practice on the development of creative thinking among preschool children. The study used the general screening model of the Torrance Thinking Creatively in Action and Movement test (TCAMt) to assess the level of motor creativity in children. The study participants were 120 4-5…

The study presented in this article is part of a larger study called Progressive Feedback (blogs.helsinki.fi/orientate), which is an early childhood education and care (ECEC) research and development project. The aim of this article is to find out: (1) how children's tested creative thinking abilities, fluency, originality and imagination…

This article explores how creative visual imagination and creative thinking can help children to construct mental models of space. A mixed-method study, integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches and involving 98 five-year-old children (54 girls and 44 boys) demonstrated that creative visual imagination, rather than creative thinking, is…

In an online graduate-level early childhood education course, the authors sought to playfully disrupt and transform educators' conceptions of children's "dark play," as provoked by contemporary popular culture. Embracing the imaginative potential of darkness and liminality, the course participants problematized and expanded their…

This small scale research project examines opportunities for creative thinking and imagination through den making in a rural private day nursery with its own woodland area on the borders of England and Wales in the UK. The research is underpinned by sociocultural theory and is an ethnographic study of non-participant observations of children aged…

Individual differences in creativity across the lifespan have been identified, but little research has focused on the development of creativity during early adolescence. This project examined individual differences on two measures of creativity in early adolescence as well as the predictability of adolescent creativity from pretend play behaviors…

This paper broadly summarizes research conclusions on the following aspects of creativity: characteristics of the creative behavior of preschool children; specific thinking abilities that account for differences in the degree of creativity from one person to another (fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration); general conditions under…

Tested whether 2- to 4-year olds could reason with incongruent syllogisms when encouraged to use their imagination. Randomly assigned 2-, 3-, and 4-year olds to one of four conditions (no cue, word cue, fantasy planet, or imagery) and presented syllogistic reasoning problems with incongruent information. Found that in imagination conditions, 2-…

The study of four highly original preschool children found that the children had high levels of inner imagination, extremely varied expressive creative behavior with each having a "specialty area" as a creative focus, and different levels of social competence. Results support D. Shmukler's model for organizing elements of creativity in preschool…

A study investigated the effects of a creative thinking program on Korean gifted and typical preschoolers. Compared to a control group (n=40), the 40 program participants (both gifted and typical) performed significantly higher on tests of cognitive ability and creative abilities of originality, imagination, and fluency. (Contains six references.)…

Children who had been removed from deleterious family environments were exposed to 10 sessions of imaginative play training. When compared with matched controls, experimental subjects showed significant post training increments in imagination, positive emotionality, prosocial behaviors, and storytelling skills and decreases in overt aggression.…