Creative experiences for Children

Creative Experiences for Children 2(1+1)

Lesson 9 : Planning Creative Activities for Children

Psychological variables

1. Scholastic Achievement: The type of educational and academic environment the Indian children are placed requires a high degree of conformity in action and convergent thinking. With this background creativity measures which basically tap divergent thinking should not have higher correlations with academic performances.


2. Academic Motivation: In Indian situation, the curriculum is such that the students can achieve more by restricting themselves to traditional ways of studying. Since the curriculum aim at bringing up conformity, students with high motivation for academic achievement, therefore, tend to restrict to the traditional method of answering their questions which may deteriorate their performance on tests requiring divergent thinking. Thus academic motivation to the students may have a negative bearing on scores obtained on creativity tests.


3. Positive Attitude to School: A student with positive attitude towards school is likely to take more interest in the school activities and this may facilitate his performance in all the school activities. His positive attitude to school may induce him to think in varied ways and make him more receptive to all kinds of information in the school. Positive attitude to school helps children derive pleasure and self-satisfaction from their work.


4. Social Desirability: The type of socialization to which subjects have been exposed determines to a large extent, the creative performance both quantitatively and qualitatively. Socialization is the basic means which culturally influencing the individual and social desirability in positive direction fosters creativity.


5. Agreement Response (AR):Directionality of emotion showed consistently high positive correlations with ideational fluency. A tendency to enjoy and yield to immediate, situational short-term forces of both internal and external nature.“Any tendency causing a person consistently to give different responses to test items than he would, when the same content is presented in a different form.” Based on this concept of response set, the response tendencies to agree to any kind of situation will make them acquiesce and have a negative bearing on creativity.


6. Intelligence: Some authors have suggested that creativity and intelligence may become independent only after a critical I.Q level has been exceeded.


7. Characteristics preferred by parents: Parental attitudes play a vital role in the personality development of the child. Parents communicate directly their beliefs, attitudes and standards to the child. They communicate their expectations to their children by reinforcing what they think to be desirable in child. Hence, the parental training is a determining factor in the child’s response to a particular situation.


8. Teacher Behaviour Perceived by Students (TBPS): Teacher verbal act or way of communication such admiring, appraisal, informational, questioning appears to have a differential impact on subsequent student verbal creativity.