Особенности структуры образной креативности у школьников младшего и старшего возраста

Abstract

A study of age-related characteristics of creativity may aid understanding of mechanisms related to thinking style formation and identify the patterns of creative development in school students. Longitudinal studies indicate that the creative potential of children may be a predictor of their future social and personal success. The paper presents the results of studying age characteristics of imaginative creativity in schoolchildren aged 9–15. The age range is chosen in view of the evidence on uneven manifestation of creative abilities in children due to nonlinear dynamics of intellectual development. The quantitative assessment of creativity indices (originality, fluency, and flexibility) used a computerized data processing tool. The data was obtained through Torrance’s “Circles” task and “Incomplete Figures” task. The study revealed higher originality of drawings in older students compared to younger ones when performing the “Circles” task. This may be due to the age-related categorical expansion of the range of imaginary objects under the conditions when imaginative stereotypes have to be abandoned. The “Incomplete Figures” task did not reveal any reliable intergroup differences in creativity indices. However, in younger school students it showed their correlation with interest and difficulty level (self-assessed). A higher appreciation of the difficulty of the task by older students may indicate age-related willingness to inject motivation in creative productivity. The content analysis of children’s imaginative creativity showed that the age-related structural reorganization of imaginative creativity may be based on the changes in the thematic categories of ideas generated by students: younger school students opt for such thematic categories as “Nature”, “Fantasy”, “Toys”, whereas older students tend to choose other categories with the priority given to the category “Person”.