Creativity and Intelligence in Applied Educational Psychology - Final Reflection

TWhile reviewing my prior reflections to help me prepare for this final paper, I noticed that Vygotsky was at the top of my mind when we started to explore Creativity during module one. He returned during the second-to-last lesson about cognitive mechanisms of Intelligence in which we focused on scaffolding as well as the zone of proximal development. His ideas seem the most natural and appropriate to well-developed learning environments that improve students’ self-efficacy by keeping both parties of the educational experience – student and teacher – investing in appropriate levels of engagement. This fits very well with Wallas’s model of creativity as well as Palincsar’s elements of cognitive instruction in which intentional learning requires the teacher to view all students as capable of the classwork, and most importantly, communicate consistently as they work together. This class has enabled me to expand prior knowledge from a summer class about Learning, Cognition and Assessment with additional connections that clarify for me the learning relationship between creativity and intelligence. As the lecture notes stated, “Helping students learn intentionally… will empower them to become independent learners.”

I was pleasantly shocked while preparing my extra credit assignment when I encountered several achievement tests used to measure the impact of chess training on math, reading, and meta-cognitive skills. First, I was shocked because I had stopped feeling dismissive of the tests as ‘just another IQ estimate’ because of the time we used to deep dive into the intelligence tests at the midpoint of this semester. Second, I was shocked because as I looked up the tests online, they reminded me of the Digit Span module in the WCIS test as well as the Sequential Processing and Achievement subtests in the K-ABC test, and the section in Binet’s test for Quantitative Reasoning came to mind as I read more about the SPM for math assessment. It felt good to be comfortable with the content in these tests and it felt good to read them and more quickly understand what they meant, so I spent less time on that deep dive. The case studies, the scholarly article review, and the extra credit assignment provided so many opportunities to learn about the scientific study of psychology and that changed my perception of intelligence testing in general. Additionally, the exposure to the reports in the case studies helped me develop a format to organize the information in the scholarly article and the extra credit projects, prioritizing incisive brevity in the summary, being clear upfront about the mechanisms used by the study and their weaknesses, then leading with the successful results because they were most interesting to my audience.

A significant difference between creativity and intelligence that became more apparent to me while working on the material for this class will be useful as I continue my education here at UMN. Externalization is a foundational aspect of creativity – both little-c and big-C – because an idea requires more than the mind of the beholder to be creative. On the other hand, the evidence about Intelligence implies such a biogenetic causation that sharing probably is not required. Sharing is a huge part of creativity – in individualistic and collectivist societies alike despite each culture’s drastically different response to it. Intelligence is a state of being that may be recognized and measured with a test, by successfully completing a task at work or in school, or by a count of patents. That last measure is where it overlaps with Creativity but the difference is significant. While most of the course material about Intelligence can be categorized as one or both of two of Cattell’s five factors, fluid and crystallized intelligence, the multi-factorial generalized intelligence is the mechanism that overlaps with creativity and can be seen in measurements such as patents. At Amazon, where I worked for so long, patents have been an important aspect of career development at the highest levels. Many of the senior executives have at least one and some of the top leaders have twenty or more. Working as we did during the beginning of retail e-commerce era, patent ideas were a bit like fish in the barrel, but those executives have the extreme fluid intelligence (internally, named “intuition”), and a broad scope of crystallized knowledge, and they use both creatively to transfer ideas between domains and show off their consistently good judgement through high velocity decision-making every day.

Finally, I am thankful for Ritchie’s debunking of “learning styles” in the opening pages of his book because it provided good reasons for the skepticism I have always felt about the concept. Later, as we learned about more modern approaches to intelligence, the differences in intelligence that were caricatured by “learning styles” developed into the modern, more reasonable approach of multi-factor intelligence, for example Sternberg’s triarchic intelligence which I most certainly prefer. My goal is to work in the public high school system where I will encounter many different types of students and parents with different educational backgrounds. After this class, I feel more prepared to apply what I have learned in this course about scaffolding, fluid and crystallized intelligence, and the importance of externalizing creativity to my classroom, lesson plans, and assessment strategies.