Creative potential in flux: The leading role of originality during early adolescent development

Abstract

Divergent thinking can approximate creative potential of individuals and provide a valid way to understand the creative thinking process and creative development. Still, little is known about how the primary factors that make up divergent thinking—fluency, flexibility, and originality—develop during the early stages of adolescence. The dual pathway model suggests that creativity can emerge from both persistence and cognitive flexibility pathways. This study addresses current gaps about this theory, and tests the dual pathway model at the level of both creative ideation tasks and developmental change across time using the random intercepts cross-lagged panel model. That model controls for the autoregression effect of prior level on subsequent score as well as the effect of one factor on change in another. The results suggest that originality and fluency remain relatively stable from Grades 6–8, while flexibility increases from Grade 7–8. Within each wave, fluency showed the only positive relation with originality, suggesting the persistence pathway may be primary during early adolescence. Neither pathway explained developmental change. Originality influenced increase in flexibility and fluency, and that increase flexibility influenced further increase in fluency. Originality contributed to higher levels of creative illustration, creative self-efficacy, and creative self-concept. Fluency led to higher levels of creative metacognition. Developing ideas that are high in originality requires effort, time, practice, and strategy across different contexts. Formal learning opportunities to develop affect and skills for originality in ideas may converge with developmental advantages for creative potential in early adolescence, supporting students’ self-beliefs, metacognition, and cognition related to creativity.