Creative thought: structure, components, and educational implications.

Fostering creativity has been a primary goal of many programs for gifted students. To design appropriate educational programs for developing creative thinking skills, however, requires an understanding of the nature of creative thought. In this article, the author reviews recent studies on the cognitive mechanisms underlying creative thought and proposes a general model. This model holds that creative thought involves interactions among a number of distinct cognitive components. Some of the implications of this model for the design of effective educational programs are discussed.

"Practitioners are recognizing that giftedness in young people is a set of behaviors brought to bear on complex problems requiring an insightful, logical, or creative solution" (Renzulli & Purcell, 1996). This seemingly straightforward statement has several important implications. For example, this view leads us to the conclusion that giftedness should be defined in a flexible fashion, focusing on performance capabilities rather than fixed traits (Gardner, 1983; Sternberg & Clinkenbeard, 1995). It suggests, moreover, that educational programs for the gifted should seek to develop creative thinking skills-those skills needed to solve novel, complex problems.

This goal, although laudable, poses a problem for educators. Ideally, our understanding of creative thought should provide guidance for the design of requisite educational programs to develop or encourage creativity. Many models of creative thought have been proposed over the years (e.g., Dewey, 1910; Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992; Isaksen & Parres, 1985; Merrifield, Guilford, Christensen, & Frick, 1962; Wallas, 1926). As a result, we are left with a situation where many developmental activities are possible, but little guidance, either empirical or theoretical, is available to help us identify those likely to make a real contribution to the development of students' creative thinking skills (Bull, Montgomery, & Baloche, 1995). Will "real world" experience really help develop students' creative thinking skills? Should we encourage students to work on self-initiated projects or should we make sure they grasp basic principles? Is exploration more important than feedback about performance errors?

We need research to answer these and a host of other questions addressing the development of students' creative thinking skills. Nonetheless, it is unlikely this research will prove to be of great value unless we have a more comprehensive, integrative framework for understanding creative thought. Accordingly, in this article, I will present a framework for understanding creative thought, noting the key cognitive capacities people apply in solving novel, complex problems. I will then examine some of the implications of this model for the development of students' creative thinking skills.

Models

Types of Models

When one considers the many models of creative thought that have been proposed over the years, the stated goal may appear very ambitious. It should be recognized, however, that virtually all models of creative thought are based on either of two broad sets of assumptions. The first of these sees creative thought as an unconscious, uncontrollable phenomenon. This view of creative thought is evident in models that stress the importance of insight and the "aha" experience (e.g., Arieti, 1976; Dallob & Dominowski, 1992; Wallas, 1926). The second set of assumptions sees creative thought as a directed, controlled phenomenon that ultimately depends on the active manipulation of available information using mechanisms such as analogical reasoning (e.g., Qin & Simon, 1990; Stemberg & Lubart, 1991).

Unconscious Associations

Models of creative thought that stress the importance of the unconscious take as their point of departure the "aha" experience where a solution suddenly emerges after a period of preparation and incubation. For example, Houtz and Frankel (1992) found that providing students with a period of incubation by having them work on a distraction task ultimately contributed to the production of more original solutions on a divergent thinking task. Associational mechanisms, mental interconnections among ideas or emotions, are commonly used to explain these sorts of effects (Seifert, Meyer, Davidson, Patalano, & Yaniv, 1995). More specifically, representations, abstractions of past performances, are held to be associated with each other and relevant situational cues. Problem solving arises from actuating the right representation, either directly vis-a-vis relevant cues, or through the spread of activation on the network of associations, a phenomenon which may account for incubation. Those associations, and the rule systems limiting representation, are held to be experientially based and outside conscious awareness, in the sense that they cannot be easily anticipated (Dienes, 1992; Reber, 1989; Seger, 1994).

Other evidence is available which underscores the importance of associational mechanisms to creative thought. For example, Mednick and Mednick (1967) have shown that measures reflecting the ability to identify remote associations are related to creative achievement. Along similar lines, studies by Eysenck (in press) and Proctor (1993) indicate that phenomena related to a widening of associational horizons, such as over-inclusion, attending to a wide range of stimulants, or simply performing manipulations intended to force new associations, contribute to creative thought. These models can be extended to account for the role of intuition in many creative efforts - in particular, intuition based on implicit rule systems (Policastro, 1995). In addition, these models may aid us in understanding the emotion, implicit or explicit, in many creative ventures in relation to associational links with goals and outcomes salient to the individual (Epstein, 1994).

The question that arises at this juncture is whether these associational systems are indeed unconscious. Some initial evidence along these lines has been provided by Metcalfe (1986), who collected "feeling of warmth" ratings ("How close are you to a solution?") from students as they worked on routine problems and novel insight problems, and found that insight problems, as opposed to more routine problems, displayed the sudden increases in warmth ratings characteristic of insight based on unconscious associational networks. In another study along the same lines, Jausovec and Bakracevik (1995) found that these sudden increases in feeling of warmth ratings were correlated with increases in heart rate-a finding pointing to arousal of unconscious affect.

Conscious Analogies

Models of creative thought that stress conscious analogical reasoning do not typically see affect as an essential aspect of creative thought. Instead, these models stress the fundamental importance of knowledge and the person's active, conscious acquisition and manipulation of knowledge. Thus, general cognitive abilities, or more specific abilities, that promote the more rapid acquisition of knowledge in certain domains or the more rapid processing of this information, are held to represent, along with expertise, crucial influences on cognitive thought (Ericsson & Charness, 1994; Snow & Swanson, 1992).

Even as they recognize the influence of abilities and expertise, these models stress the importance of what people do with the knowledge they have available. Thus, most models of this sort attempt to understand creative thought in terms of requisite processes and the operations and strategies people use as they execute these processes. Although a number of process models have been proposed, most assume that multiple interdependent processes are involved in creative problem solving, including problem construction, information gathering, information organization, combination and reorganization, idea generation, idea evaluation, implementation planning, and monitoring (Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992; Mumford, Mobley, Uhlman, Reiter-Palmon, 8,: Doares, 1991; Sternberg, 1986). However, the importance of a given process may vary with problem type, such that information gathering is very important for creative problem solving in science, while idea evaluation is more important in design and marketing.

Of these processes, the combination and reorganization process is viewed as the one most likely to be consistently important. It is only through combination and reorganization of extant knowledge structures that it is possible to generate the new understandings that provide the basis for idea generation (Mumford & Gustafson, in press). Recent studies by Finke (Finke, 1995; Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992) and Mumford (Mumford, Baughman, Maher, Costanza, & Supinski, in press) have shown that skill in combining and reorganizing concepts of knowledge is related to performance on a variety of creative problem solving tasks, including machine design problems, advertising problems, business problems, and story writing problems, yielding correlations with indices of solution quality and originality in the 40's, while accounting for variance beyond that attributable to relevant abilities.

Recent work by Baughman and Mumford (1995) and Mumford, Baughman, Maher, Costanza, and Supinski (in press) examining the operations and strategies used in executing the combination and reorganization process found that when people were asked to combine similar concepts (e.g., birds and pets), instructions encouraging the identification and mapping of overlapping features (e.g., live in houses) promoted the production of the highest quality, most original solutions. However, when people were asked to combine more diverse categories (e.g., birds and vacations), instructions encouraging a focus on overlapping features were not as effective at encouraging creative production as instructions calling for the use of metaphors (e.g., birds fly and flight represents freedom). These findings underscore the importance of applying appropriate strategies when executing certain processes and illustrate the need for multiple strategies to be used in executing different processes. Even given this point, it should be clear that combination and reorganization, and thus creative thought, ultimately depend on analogical reasoning where one explicitly searches for relationships and uses these abstract relationships as a basis for generating new understandings (Mumford & Gustafson, in press; Reeves & Weisburg, 1994). Subsequent elaboration of these new understandings through divergent thinking in idea generation and then evaluation and implementation of those ideas makes creative thought creative problem solving.

An Integrative Model

As Keane (1991) points out, it is difficult to see how the generation of new understandings through analogical reasoning mechanisms can occur without active conscious processing. This conclusion is consistent with the findings of Heinzen, Mills, and Cameron (1993), indicating that attention span and inquisitiveness are among the best predictors of achievement for gifted students working in the sciences. These observations make it difficult to see how one can integrate the unconscious associational and conscious analogical models of creative thought. One potential solution to this quandary may be found in a recent study by Sawyer (1992). Sawyer used observational techniques to identify the thought processes used by jazz musicians during a performance. He found that cycles of conscious and unconscious processing occurred at different points in the performance. In his study of artists, Martindale (1990) reached a similar conclusion, arguing that both conscious and unconscious mechanisms were involved at different points in a creative effort.

These observations suggest that an integrative model might be developed which incorporates both types of creative thought. Figure 1 provides an illustration of this kind of model, indicating the major kinds of cognitive components likely to be involved. The model outlines the processes that contribute to creative problem solutions, from the activation of mental representations by external cues, through the allocation of attentional resources and construction of the problem, to the manipulation of mental models and base concepts and the generation of potential problem solutions.

[Figure 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This model holds that creative thought begins with unconscious associational mechanisms as cues in the stimulus situation and spreading activation of certain representations. Activation of salient representatives results in affect and allocation of attention to certain representations. These activated representations in turn provide the basis for initiating conscious processing during problem construction, where the goals, diagnostics, procedures, and restrictions embedded in activated representations are screened, and the common elements appearing in these representations are used to define or structure the nature of the problem (Holyoak & Spellman, 1993; Mumford, Reiter-Palmon, & Redmond, 1994). Once conscious processing has been initiated, processes such as information gathering, and combination and reorganization, along with the associated strategies, are used to manipulate knowledge structures and provide the new understandings that serve as the basis for idea generation and translation of these new ideas into action.

With regard to this model, two somewhat subtle points are worthy of mention. First, knowledge within this model may be manipulated through the use of base concepts, or relatively simple, but important ideas. However, these base concepts may be organized into more complex structures: mental models reflecting systems involving a number of concepts. Second, conscious processes may also be applied in the manipulation of these more complex structures (Goldschmidt, 1991). For example, Carlson and Gorman (1992) have shown that Alexander Graham Bell's success in developing the telephone may be attributed to the use of a more appropriate model-the ear rather than the telegraph. In fact, reorganization of knowledge structures to create new mental models may represent an aspect of creative thought of equal importance to the creation of new base concepts (Mumford & Connelly, 1993).

The model presented in Figure 1 not only stresses the importance of knowledge, it also assumes that creative thought, once conscious processing has been initiated, is a highly-directed activity. Combination and reorganization depends on the acquisition of relevant information, appropriate procedures, and the availability of viable concepts for organizing and understanding this information. In this sense, critical thought and careful, extensive information searches lay a foundation for the creation of the new understandings that are the hallmark of creative thought (Mumford, Baughman, & Sager, in press). Divergent thinking in subsequent idea generation occurs relatively late in the cycle, followed by an evaluation of the ideas for originality and workability, as well as an evaluation of the ideas' acceptability (Runco & Chand, 1994).

In executing all these processes, however, multiple operations will be called for that might be executed in a number of different ways. The usefulness of these strategies, like the importance of particular processes, will vary with the nature of the problem at hand. This flexible use of strategies, especially systematic strategies which avoid trial and error, may be essential for creative thought (Kaizer & Shore, 1995; Carr, Alexander, & Schwanenflugel, 1996). Furthermore, individuals may differ in preferred strategies, preferred processes, and preferred mechanisms, leading to the possibility that multiple cognitive styles may influence creative thought. In fact, recent studies of the cognitive styles linked to creative thought suggest that two major styles are commonly observed, one reflecting a preference for the use of unconscious associations, often characteristic of artists, and one reflecting a preference for conscious analogical reasoning, often characteristic of scientists (Martinsen, 1993; Mumford, Costanza, Threlfall, Baughman, & Reiter-Palmon, 1993; Stocki, 1991).

Supporting Evidence

This model is attractive in part because it seems consistent with a number of somewhat anomalous observations that have emerged in recent studies of creative thought. For example, this model assumes that unconscious associational processes precede conscious analogical reasoning, solving a recognition and structuring function. Some support for this proposition has been provided in studies by Davidson (1995), who found that the sudden emergence of solutions was more likely to occur on problems emphasizing initial definition of the situation than problems calling for the combination of knowledge structures. Along similar lines, Gentner, Ratterman, and Forbus (1993) found that degree of similarity in the superficial attributes of the problem was associated with problem recognition, while the use of underlying analogies was relevant when knowledge needed to be transferred to novel problems.

Another implication of this model pertains to the conditions under which incubation is observed in creative thought. Specifically, incubation effects are contingent on whether the problem can be solved easily, once one looks at it in the right way, and whether the relevant representations are available. Individuals, however, are likely to have a range of representations available only when they have substantial experience in a domain. Thus, this model appears consistent with the finding that incubation seems more characteristic of experts' than novices' creative efforts (Ericsson & Chamess, 1994).

A third and final implication of this model pertains to the allocation of attentional resources. Mumford, Reiter-Palmon, and Redmond (1994) have shown that active processing can be induced by having students restate problems before starting work. Active processing during problem construction was shown to contribute to solution quality and originality on an advertising task. However, when students were asked to solve "real life" leadership, school, and counseling problems, this manipulation did not have significant effects on solution quality and originality (Reiter-Palmon, Mumford, Boes, & Runco, 1995). Presumably, the students' perceptions of the goals associated with these latter tasks as being relevant resulted in attention and active processing, making the instructional manipulation unnecessary.

Educational Implications

The model of creative thought presented above is still in its initial stages of development. Nonetheless, I believe that this model, and the supporting research, even at this early juncture have some noteworthy implications for the development of creative thinking skills. In the following sections, I discuss the implications of the model with regard to the content that might be provided and the processes that might be taught in a program to develop creativity. I also discuss implications of the model for the structure of such programs and for the assessment of students' creative thinking skills.

Content

Processes and strategies used to generate new ideas operate on knowledge. In fact, it is through the acquisition and application of implicit, associational structures and explicit, analogical structures that creative thought becomes possible. Thus, creative thinking skills are contextualized. Effective skill development will therefore require application of skills within various content domains (Campbell, McCloy, Oppler, & Sager, 1993).

As skills are acquired within content domains, a number of steps might be taken that are likely to promote later creativity. With respect to the formal knowledge structures used in conscious processing, two points should be borne in mind. First, it is advisable to develop base concepts in such a way that principles, or features, are clearly articulated and students are provided with multiple instantiations of those concepts. Of course, efforts along these lines are most likely to prove successful if students are asked to actively work with and apply those concepts (Chi, Bassock, Lewis, Reimann, & Glaser, 1989). Second, it should be recognized that creative thought may often involve more complex knowledge structures, such as mental models, as well as base concepts. Accordingly, once students have developed the requisite base concepts, exercises will prove useful that illustrate: major models for understanding different phenomena; the principles involved in constructing coherent models, and the potential applications of alternative models (Mumford & Gustafson, in press).

Formal knowledge is not the only kind of knowledge that influences creative thought. Clearly, the representations derived from past experience and the associational rules linking these representations are a form of knowledge that structures initial problem definitions and directs self-initiated creative problem solving. Educators can also seek to develop creative thought by influencing these implicit associational structures. For example, one might try to provide students with real world problem solving experiences consistent with the students' goals and interests. In fact, this experiential approach has become a noteworthy new component of many innovative programs for the gifted (Renzulli, 1994). Experiences of this sort, however, are most likely to prove useful in developing creative thinking skills if they are structured to provide multiple, diverse representations. One way this might be accomplished is by asking students to list and discuss relationships they see among current events.

With regard to experiential learning, however, an important caveat should be noted. Experiential learning is inherently somewhat unstructured, and effective use of experience in creative thought requires the availability of multiple, interrelated representations. As a result, educational experiences of this sort typically represent a late cycle learning activity, proving most beneficial after students have acquired some formal expertise working within a domain. This conclusion is consistent with the observations of Ericsson and Charness (1994), indicating that effective use of representational systems in insight problems is only consistently observed after people have some experience working with certain types of problems.

Procedures

The model presented above specifies that creative thought also involves the processes, operations, and strategies needed to work with information. Our observations with regard to the nature and structure of these knowledge manipulation procedures also have some important implications for how we seek to develop creative thinking skills. First, although attempts to develop creative thinking skills have traditionally focused primarily on divergence in the exploration of alternatives, the model of creative thought at hand suggests that critical thinking skills may provide a necessary foundation for creative thought. One cannot create viable new understandings through combination and reorganization, unless one has first gathered pertinent information and structured this information appropriately (Mumford, Baughman, & Sager, in press). Accordingly, educational activities that provide students with procedures for identifying key factual information and anomalous observations, while helping them learn to separate the wheat from the chaff, may provide a necessary skill for the generation of viable new ideas.

Second, the need for controlled, critical thought prior to the creation of new understandings and subsequent idea generation is not the only point where evaluative activities influence creative thought; indeed, new ideas must be evaluated and plans for implementing viable ideas must be generated. These observations suggest that we might improve creative thought by providing students with standards for evaluating new ideas and identifying restrictions on, or potential downstream problems associated with, plans for implementing new ideas. It may, however, prove difficult to translate these principles into classroom settings where we now get "the one right answer." One way we might address this issue is to provide students with additional standards for evaluating new ideas-for example, coherence, comprehensiveness, usefulness, and originality (Runco & Chand, 1994; Thagard, 1989). Also, exercises that encourage students to see problems and solutions as dynamic entities they can redefine or revise as they identify restrictions might prove useful, particularly when accompanied by appropriate feedback from peers and teachers (Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, & Fleishman, in press).

Third, although critical, creative thought both precedes and proceeds the creation of new understandings and generation of ideas, these divergent processes represent a crucial component of creative thought. Typically, creativity is greatest when people use understandings they have developed to generate new ideas (Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992). Although this suggests that the independent creation of new understandings should be encouraged in students, it should be recognized that the identification of relationships and construction of concepts is a difficult and time consuming activity. As a result, problems calling for the generation of new concepts should be carefully graded to the student's level of development. Moreover, early in a developmental sequence, where expertise is lacking, it may prove useful to encourage students to generate ideas around given concepts or hypothetical models that have a number of implications. For example, students might be asked to "brain storm" about possible uses for a paper clip or ways to find information about another country's national holidays. Such extended search exercises where students look for the implications of a concept may do much to facilitate idea generation while discouraging the belief that new concepts and new ideas emerge in full power requiring little elaboration and refinement.

Finally, the model of creative thought presented above also suggests some concrete ways we can help students learn to create new understandings and new ideas. For example, combination and reorganization depends on the identification of relationships. Thus, students might benefit from instruction that demonstrates linkages or relationships among different concepts. Another potentially useful procedure is to teach students about the various types of relationships (e.g., temporal) within a domain and to illustrate the kind of strategies (e.g., feature mapping, use of metaphors) that might be used to construct relationships (Baughman & Mumford, 1995).

In showing students how to apply the strategies involved in the combination and reorganization process or other relevant processes, such as information gathering, two points should be borne in mind. First, curricula should be designed both to illustrate strategies and to provide practice in strategy application (Kay, 1994), because both the understanding of approaches and practice applying strategies contribute to creative thought (Mumford, Baughman, & Sager, in press). Second, allowing students to try to discover strategies on their own, at least initially, may prove problematic, as they may default to a simple trial and error approach or try to apply inappropriate, inefficient strategies that interfere with learning (Ward, 1991).

Structure

The model described here also has implications for the structure of instruction in creative thinking. In particular, the exercises used will depend on the domain at hand and the kind of processes and strategies under consideration. For example, given the differences observed between unconscious associational mechanisms and conscious analogical mechanisms, one would not expect the same exercises to prove useful in developing these different creative thinking skills. This point is nicely illustrated in a series of studies by Houtz and Frankel (1992) and Suler and Rizziello (1987). Their studies of imagery exercises, a technique intended to facilitate associational search, indicate that this type of developmental activity has little effect on creative problem solving when conscious, directed thought is required. On the other hand, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that exercises intended to encourage effective information gathering through a search for key facts and observations that are inconsistent with these facts would prove of limited value in facilitating the application of unconscious associational mechanisms in creative thought.

This observation is of some importance because it points to a broader conclusion. Creative thought involves multiple systems and a number of different cognitive elements. As a result, we cannot expect that a single type of educational program will provide a "magic bullet." Instead, what is needed are packages of educational activities intended to develop different components of creative thought. These packages of activities, moreover, might be structured so that the capacities being developed occur in a sequence facilitating the acquisition of progressively more complex creative thinking skills. Thus, the development of base concepts and initial models, along with information gathering and evaluation skills, should generally precede exercises intended to encourage the independent development of new understandings.

In developing educational packages such as those called for above, it is important to consider that the cognitive capacities that have the greatest impact on creative thought vary somewhat from domain to domain, depending on the nature of the problems confronting students. For example, problem construction appears to represent a particularly important influence on creative problem solving for artists (Dudeck & Cote, 1994; Kay, 1994), while idea generation is particularly important for creative problem solving in business settings (Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, & Fleishman, in press). Thus, the amount of time invested in developing certain capacities should vary somewhat from one domain to another.

Assessment

The domain dependence of creative thought is of particular concern when we want to identify students who would benefit from programs for the gifted and talented (Baer, 1994; Callahan, 1991; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). In fact, the model of creative thought at hand suggests a potential compromise between general assessments of creative potential and more tailored performance-based assessments. When predictions about potential must be made across a number of domains, measures of intelligence, divergent thinking, and associational abilities may have some value. The model proposed here, however, suggests the usefulness of measures of potential based on other key processes, such as problem construction and combination and reorganization, which play a general role across domains of creative thought. In fact, Mumford, Baughman, Supinski, Costanza, and Threlfall (in press) have shown that measures intended to assess effective application of these processes can be developed to predict performance on a variety of creative problem solving tasks, while accounting for variance above and beyond that attributable to traditional ability measures.

When it is not possible to assess creative potential within a given performance domain, however, this model suggests some alternatives. For example, one might assess potential by examining the quality of the mental models students construct from a set of base categories. Alternatively, one might examine the efficiency and flexibility with which students apply various processing strategies representing important influences on performance. Thus, by understanding creative thought and applying new, more sophisticated cognitive models it may prove possible to formulate a new approach to talent identification.

Conclusion

Some of these new assessment techniques and many of the educational activities recommended above have yet to be applied in programs for the gifted and talented. Programmatic efforts along these lines, however, may do much to enhance gifted education by developing the creative thinking skills students will need in the future, while providing students of creativity with an understanding of what really makes a difference in the development of creative thinking skills (Davis, 1991; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995; Treffinger, Sortore, & Cross, 1993; Walberg, & Herbig, 1991). Hopefully, the present effort will serve as an impetus for the systematic, theory-based development and evaluation efforts needed to make continuous progress in serving the needs of gifted students as we seek to develop their creative potential.

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Linda Kreger Silverman is a licensed psychologist and Director of the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development and its subsidiary, the Gifted Development Center, in Denver, Colorado. Editor of Advanced Development Journal, she also edited the popular textbook, Counseling the Gifted and Talented.

Manuscript submitted January, 1997. Revision accepted June, 1997.