The zone of proximal creativity: What dynamic assessment of divergent thinking reveals about students’ latent class membership |
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| Institution: | Department of Research Methods and Information Science, University of Denver, United States |
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| Abstract: | Divergent Thinking is a domain-general mental attribute closely associated with creativity that can be quantified through the use of text-mining algorithms. Past research has shown that students’ Divergent Thinking is malleable in response to relatively simple contextual prompts. In addition, there is substantial variance in the degree to which individual students’ Divergent Thinking is malleable, suggesting the presence of a student-specific zone-of-proximal-development in relation to creativity. Here, we adopted a dynamic assessment paradigm that included multiple conditions under which student Divergent Thinking was measured and fit a latent profile analysis model to that dynamic assessment data. We found that, although on average the Originality of student responses can be augmented through a prompt to generate surprising or unusual ideas, three latent classes emerged that differed significantly on their patterns of augmentation. These three latent classes were termed: (a) Conventional Thinkers (7.80% of the sample), whose response to the Divergent Thinking task were highly constrained and unoriginal across all conditions (b) Prompted Shifters (66.56%), whose Originality significantly increased across conditions, and (c) Idea Generators (25.64%), whose responses were highly original across all conditions. These latent profiles were validated in regard to personality characteristics and domain-specific creative activities, with Idea Generators reporting significantly more Openness and Intellect, less Industriousness, and more creative activities across the domains of Literature, Music, Sports, Visual Art, Science, and Cooking than did the other latent classes. |
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| Keywords: | Creativity Dynamic assessment Divergent thinking Latent profile analysis |
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