This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licensepoint, then, developing students’ convergent thinking—as schoolwork often does by emphasizing mastery of
content—facilitates students’ divergent thinking indirectly, and hence also their creativity (Sternberg, 2003; Runco,
2004; Cropley, 2006). But carried to extremes, excessive emphasis on convergent thinking may discourage
creativity.
Whether in school or out, creativity seems to flourish best when the creative activity is its own intrinsic reward,
and a person is relatively unconcerned with what others think of the results. Whatever the activity—composing a
song, writing an essay, organizing a party, or whatever—it is more likely to be creative if the creator focuses on and
enjoys the activity in itself, and thinks relatively little about how others may evaluate the activity (Brophy, 2004).
Unfortunately, encouraging students to ignore others' responses can sometimes pose a challenge for teachers. Not
only is it the teachers' job to evaluate students’ learning of particular ideas or skills, but also they have to do so
within restricted time limits of a course or a school year. In spite of these constraints, though, creativity still can be
encouraged in classrooms at least some of the time (Claxton, Edwards, & Scale-Constantinou, 2006). Suppose, for
example, that students have to be assessed on their understanding and use of particular vocabulary. Testing their
understanding may limit creative thinking; students will understandably focus their energies on learning “right”
answers for the tests. But assessment does not have to happen constantly. There can also be times to encourage
experimentation with vocabulary through writing poems, making word games, or in other thought-provoking ways.
These activities are all potentially creative. To some extent, therefore, learning content and experimenting or
playing with content can both find a place—in fact one of these activities can often support the other. We return to
this point later in this chapter, when we discuss student-centered strategies of instruction, such as cooperative
learning and play as a learning medium.
Problem-solving............................................................................................................................................
Somewhat less open-ended than creative thinking is problem solving, the analysis and solution of tasks or
situations that are complex or ambiguous and that pose difficulties or obstacles of some kind (Mayer & Wittrock,
2006). Problem solving is needed, for example, when a physician analyzes a chest X-ray: a photograph of the chest
is far from clear and requires skill, experience, and resourcefulness to decide which foggy-looking blobs to ignore,
and which to interpret as real physical structures (and therefore real medical concerns). Problem solving is also
needed when a grocery store manager has to decide how to improve the sales of a product: should she put it on sale
at a lower price, or increase publicity for it, or both? Will these actions actually increase sales enough to pay for
their costs?
Problem solving in the classroom
Problem solving happens in classrooms when teachers present tasks or challenges that are deliberately complex
and for which finding a solution is not straightforward or obvious. The responses of students to such problems, as
well as the strategies for assisting them, show the key features of problem solving. Consider this example, and
students’ responses to it. We have numbered and named the paragraphs to make it easier to comment about them
individually:
Scene #1: a problem to be solved
A teacher gave these instructions: “Can you connect all of the dots below using only four straight
lines?” She drew the following display on the chalkboard:Educational Psychology 187 A Global Text