Creativity and Intelligence in Applied Educational Psychology - Reflection 2

Module 2 – Creativity Models and Research

1. Wallas’s four-stage model of creative process (most widely used)
2. Research methods to study creativity: psychometric, historiometric, neurometric, case studies and generalization
3. Neurology of Creativity. Also, 3 studies of brain during creativity: musical, spatial, verbal

Incubation effect, first described by the Sawyer reading as “unguided and unconscious” (Sawyer, 2012, p.97) quickly developed in a more active process when observed through a focus on good creators.  The dual process theory of cognitive psychologists indicate that it is a combination of the unconscious and conscious that incubates the creative idea, which was shown to be well supported by the evidence.  This approach is a good fit for my plans to create a social-cognitive classroom after university.  The six theories of incubation, especially the second and third concepts called Rest and Selective Forgetting, were well supported by the experimental evidence reported by the teams that created the opportunistic assimilation theory.  I plan to explore the idea that “being interrupted and forced to work on an unrelated task” may be disruptive but may lead to an “increase[d] solution rate for creativity-related problems” (Sawyer, 2012, p 100) in my classroom.

Externalization – the second finding – is one of the most exciting and productive stages of the individualistic creative process.  As a leader of software development teams for the last 15 years, I learned first-hand the importance of working in 2- and 4-week Sprints, during which programmers would be assigned to multiple problems.  We met briefly each day to discuss challenges then again at the end of the Sprint for to the most important, large review discussion, during which each individual presented their results.  Often, we invited external stakeholders to this review so they could observe and provide feedback.  Many of my teams identified a snowball effect during review meetings, described in this reading as “an idea often results in other ideas and follow-on ideas” (Sawyer, 2012, p. 134).  After individuals on my teams collaborated for a while, they developed the shared “inner short-hand” as a team and used it, along with visualizations of their results, to simplify follow-up iterations on projects, much like Einstein’s approach.  Also, being assigned to multiple projects produced better results, as noted by Simonton’s evidence showing that for great creators “the most productive periods were the times when a creator was most likely to have generated a significant work,” (Sawyer, 2112, p.131) i.e., any multiple assignment burden was offset by cross-domain creativity 
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This relates to a third finding, the structure mapping concept that utilizes domain knowledge in a different domain to solve or restructure a concept or problem at hand (Sawyer, 2112, p.119).  In my first response last week, I mentioned that when hiring onto my team, we prioritized talents that were outside the scope of the role as a positive indicator for a candidate.  The “conceptual combination” and “enhancing creatively of combinations” sections provided strong evidence that that was a strong hiring approach because we were likely to find better, and more creative, problem solvers.  Just like Externalization provides the opportunity for feedback from others that will improve the result, “emergence” (Sawyer, 2021, p 117) during the sixth stage when creative ideas are being combined strengthens an individual’s creative solution.  The outcome of the emergence can be enhanced in individuals with knowledge of an outside domain.  Interestingly though, it is not the trait of being the outsider, but the outsider with external domain knowledge, that improves creative problem solving.  Both my second finding with Externalization, and this sixth stage named Combine Ideas builds on Wallas’s model’s final stage, Verification.  Over time, it seems that Wallas’s end state was further defined to include an individual’s end state (emergence) as well as a more social or public end state (externalization).