does homework kill creativity

How Education Quashed Your Creativity

Why it's difficult to find creative answers..

Posted August 13, 2021 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

• Our education (K-college) is excessively focused on getting right answers, rather than promoting creative responses.
• An overemphasis on standardized testing negatively impacts our creativity.
• The kinds of questions we're asked in school severely limits our creative output.

For much of our lives, we are predisposed to look for a single solution to a single problem (e.g., What is 2 + 2? What is the state capital of North Dakota? Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?). We have been “brainwashed” to think that for every problem, there is one, and only one, way to solve that problem. Much of our educational experiences have been focused on learning the right answers to pre-established questions. Seldom have we been offered the opportunity to consider that there might be a multitude of potential responses to any problem. The “one-problem, one-answer” syndrome has been thoroughly ingrained into almost every educational curriculum, irrespective of grade level or subject matter.

Sir Ken Robinson put this all into perspective when he wrote, “…too often our educational systems don’t enable students to develop their natural creative powers. Instead, they promote uniformity and standardization. The result is that we’re draining people of their creative possibilities and… producing a workforce that’s conditioned to prioritize conformity over creativity.” In short, our educational system is focused more on getting the right answers (thinking inside the box) than on promoting creative possibilities (thinking outside the box).

What are the ramifications?

The implications can be staggering. Logic supports the notion that an excessive focus on a one-right-answer mentality forces us into a “don’t take any risks” mindset. This obsession with getting the right answer (a proven consequence of an over-emphasis on standardized testing) conditions us not to take chances… it teaches us not to be creative. That’s because when we make too many mistakes, we get a low test score. Get a low score, and you may deprive yourself of a college education (as a result of your SAT scores), a chance at graduate school (via your GRE scores), or an occupational advancement (via your score on the LSAT [law school] exam, MCAT [medical school] exams, or PAPA [teacher certification assessment], for example).

Simply put, we are not taught how to be creative; rather, our education is focused more on “mental compliance” than it is on innovative expression. Robert Sternberg writes, “Creativity is a habit. The problem is that schools… treat it as a bad habit…. Like any habit, creativity can either be encouraged or discouraged.”

Michael Roberto, in his book Unlocking Creativity, further cements this view when he states, “Our schools [are] discouraging creative students in a variety of ways. A stream of research has shown that teachers claim to value qualities such as independent thinking and curiosity, yet they reward behaviors such as obedience and conformity.” As an educator for more than 50 years, that concerns me!

Because of the prevalence of exams in our lives (it has been estimated that students take nearly 2,500 tests, quizzes, and exams during their school years, grades K-12), we have a tendency to stay in a comfort zone: a focus on right answers. Occasionally, we may be asked to voice a creative response in class (“What do you think are some of the long-range consequences of our current trade policy with China?”), but are hesitant to do so on the belief that the teacher may be looking for a specific and particular response. Perhaps our creative answer is not the one the teacher was looking for. We may have stepped outside the bounds of what was expected and into the territory of the unknown.

The objective of most classroom lessons often becomes: Right answers get rewarded; innovative or inventive responses are frequently censured. In short, we are creating a generation of factual masters and a decided dearth of creative thinkers.

How to enhance your personal creativity

Fortunately, there are ways we can boost creative thinking at any age.

1. Ask the right questions.

On a Zoom meeting, a conference call, monthly department meeting, or any other kind of group discussion, try to avoid asking the following questions: “What is the answer?” or “What is the solution?” By posing those queries, you are severely limiting a multiplicity of responses simply because the group is now focused on finding the answer or the solution… rather than on generating a vast array of potential answers or solutions. More appropriate questions might include, “What are some possibilities here?”; “How many different ways can we look at this?”; or “What are some of the impediments we have to overcome?” In short, ask questions for which there may be a wide variety of responses, rather than questions that limit the number or type of responses.

Convincing research has overwhelmingly demonstrated that we tend to think based on the types of questions we are asked [emphasis added]. (Incidentally, during your educational career , you were asked approximately 400 classroom questions a day, or roughly 72,000 questions during any school year. There’s an abundance of data to show that about 80 percent of those questions were literal or simple recall questions.) Thus, if we ask questions for which there is the expectation of a single “correct” answer, that’s all we’ll get. On the other hand, if we pose questions that naturally generate a multiplicity of responses, then the collective creativity of the group is enhanced considerably.

2. Work backward.

Imagine writing a press release for a brand-new product long before you have even begun to design that product. Well, that’s what the folks at Amazon do. When they conceive a new product, the team sits down and drafts a full and complete press release for that product as their initial step. What are the most compelling features of the new product? What are the most significant values of the new product to consumers? What is their primary audience, and how will they target the new product to that audience? What benefits will customers get from the new product? Enormous time and energy are devoted to crafting a compelling press release long before (months or years) the product is ever ready for the marketplace.

In short, product developers must travel into the future and imagine the day the product is released to the public. Then, they are tasked with moving backward in time to conjure up the steps (in reverse order) that will be necessary to make that press release a reality. Backward thinking offers a new reality. A study in 2004 conclusively proved that when participants were tasked with completing a project from back to front (rather than the more logical front to back), they achieved higher levels of creativity. The researchers noted that participants were forced to utilize abstract, high-level, and conceptual thinking rather than logical, concrete, and time-worn thinking.

Kathryn Haydon. “When You Say You’re Not Creative…” Psychology Today.com (January 4, 2019). ( https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/adventures-in-divergent-thinkin… ).

Ken Robinson. Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative . (New York: Wiley, 2011).

Robert J. Sternberg and T.I. Lubert. Defying the Crowd: Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity . (New York: Free Press, 1995).

Michael A. Roberto. Unlocking Creativity: How to Solve Any Problem and Make the Best Decisions by Shifting Creative Mindsets . (New York, Wiley: 2019).

Anthony D. Fredericks. Ace Your First Year Teaching: How to be an Effective and Successful Teacher . (Indianapolis, IN: Blue River Press, 2017).

Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen, “How Does Amazon Stay at Day One?,” Forbes , August 8, 2017.

Anthony D. Fredericks, Ed.D. , is Professor Emeritus of Education at York College of Pennsylvania. His latest book is In Search of the Old Ones: An Odyssey Among Ancient Trees (Smithsonian Books, 2023).

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Effects of homework creativity on academic achievement and creativity disposition: Evidence from comparisons with homework time and completion based on two independent Chinese samples

Huiyong fan.

1 College of Educational Science, Bohai University, Jinzhou, China

2 Research Center of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, China

Jianzhong Xu

3 Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology, and Foundations, College of Education, Mississippi State University, MS, United States

Shengli Guo

Associated data.

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

During the past several decades, the previous studies have been focusing on the related theoretical issues and measuring tool of homework behaviors (mainly including homework time, completion, and homework creativity). However, the effects of these homework behaviors on general creativity remain unknown. Employing a number of questionnaires, this study investigated two samples from middle schools of Mainland China. The results showed that (1) the eight-item version of Homework Creativity Behaviors Scale had acceptable validity and reliability; (2) compared with homework completion and homework time, homework creativity explained less variety of academic achievement (3.7% for homework creativity; 5.4% for completion and time); (3) homework creativity explained more variance of general creativity than that of homework completion and homework time accounted (7.0% for homework creativity; 1.3% for completion and time); and (4) homework creativity was negatively associated with grade level. Contrary to the popular beliefs, homework completion and homework creativity have positive effects on the students’ general creativity. Several issues that need further studies were also discussed.

Introduction

Homework is an important part of the learning and instruction process. Each week, students around the world spend 3–14 hours on homework, with an average of 5 hours a week ( Dettmers et al., 2009 ; OECD, 2014 ). The results of the previous studies and meta-analysis showed that the homework time is correlated significantly with students’ gains on the academic tests ( Cooper et al., 2012 ; Fan et al., 2017 ; Fernández-Alonso et al., 2019 ).

Homework is a multi-faceted process which has many attributes – each attribute can be identified, defined, and measured independently ( Guo and Fan, 2018 ). Some attributes, such as homework time ( Núñez et al., 2013 ; Kalenkoski and Pabilonia, 2017 ), homework frequency ( Fernández-Alonso et al., 2015 ), homework completion ( Rosário et al., 2015 ), homework effort ( Trautwein and Lüdtke, 2007 ; Fernández-Alonso et al., 2015 ), homework purpose ( Trautwein and Lüdtke, 2009 ; Xu, 2010 , 2021 ), homework performance and problems ( Power et al., 2007 ), homework management behavior ( Xu, 2008 ), homework expectation ( Xu, 2017 ), and self-regulation of homework behavior ( Yang and Tu, 2020 ), have been well recorded in the literature, and operationally defined and measured.

Recently, a research community has noticed the “creativity” in homework (in short form, “homework creativity”) who have raised some speculations about its effects on students’ academic achievement and general creativity disposition ( Kaiipob, 1951 ; Beghetto and Kaufman, 2007 ; Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009 ; Guo, 2018 ; Guo and Fan, 2018 ; Chang, 2019 ). However, the scientific measurement of homework creativity has not been examined systematically. The relationship between homework creativity, academic achievement, and general creativity disposition, as well as the grade difference in homework creativity, are still in the state of conjectures consequently.

As a scientific probe to homework creativity, this study included three main sections. In the “Literature Review” section, the conceptualization and relevant measurement of homework creativity were summarized; the relationship between homework behaviors and academic achievements, general creativity, and the grade difference in homework behaviors and general creativity were also evaluated. These four main results related to the four research questions were also presented in the body of this article. They are reliability and validity of homework creativity behavior scale (HCBS), the relationships between the scores of HCBS and those of general creativity and academic achievement, and the grade effects of scores of HCBS. In the “Discussion” section, the scientific contributions and interpretations of the findings of this study were elaborated.

Homework creativity

Conceptual background of homework creativity.

As an attribute of homework process, homework creativity refers to the novelty and uniqueness of homework ( Guo and Fan, 2018 ). Specifically, the ways relating to homework creativity with extant theoretical literature are presented below.

First, creativity is a natural part of homework process which serves as a sub-process of learning. Guilford (1950) is the first psychologist who linked creativity with learning, pointing out that the acquisition of creativity is a typical quality of human learning, and that a complete learning theory must take creativity into account.

Second, according to the Four-C Model of Creativity (e.g., Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009 ), the homework creativity can be divided mainly into the category of “Transformative Learning” (Mini-C creativity), which is different from the “Everyday Innovation” (Little-C creativity), “Professional Expertise” (Pro-C creativity), or “Eminent Accomplishments” (Big-C creativity, Beghetto and Kaufman, 2007 ; Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009 ; Kozbelt et al., 2011 ).

The Mini-C is defined as a type of intrapersonal creativity which has personal meaning, not solid contribution or breakthrough in a field ( Beghetto and Kaufman, 2007 , p. 76, Table 1 ). The most important point which distinguishes Mini-C from other types of creativity is the level of novelty of product. The Mini-C creativity involves the personal insight or interpretation which is new to a particular individual, but may be ordinary to others. The Little-C creativity refers to any small, but solid innovation in daily life. The Pro-C creativity is represented in the form of professional contribution which is still not a breakthrough. The Big-C creativity generates a real breakthrough appears in some field which is considered as something new to all human beings. The other difference is related with the subjects of sub-types of creativity. The Mini-C creativity mainly happens in all kinds of students. The Little-C creativity can be widely found in normal people. The Pro-C creativity’s masters are those who are proficient in some field. The Big-C creativity is related frequently with those giants who has made eminent contribution to human being.

Basic information of samples 1 and 2 included.

The Mini-C creativity frequently happens in learning process. When the contribution of the Mini-C creativity grows big enough, it can move into the category of the Little-C creativity, or the Big-C creativity. Most homework creativity is of Mini-C creativity, and of which a small part may grow as the Little-C and Big-C creativities. For example, when students independently find a unique solution to a problem in homework which has scientific meaning, a Little-C or Big-C occurs.

Third, the education researchers have observed homework creativity for many years and been manipulating them in educational practice. Kaiipob (1951) described that homework is a semi-guide learning process in which homework such as composition, report, public speech, difficult and complex exercises, experiments, and making tools and models consumes a lot of time and accelerate the development of students’ creativity disposition (p. 153).

In the recent years, creativity has become a curriculum or instruction goal in many countries (the case of United Kingdom, see Smith and Smith, 2010 ; Chinese case, see Pang and Plucker, 2012 ). Homework is the most important way that accomplish this goal. Considering Chinese in primary and secondary schools in China as an example, the curriculum standards have clearly required homework to cultivate students’ creative spirit, creative thinking, and ability to imagination since the year 2000. The results of Qian’s (2006) investigation revealed that the percent of these creative homework items in each unit fluctuates between 29 and 45%.

Previous instruments of homework behaviors

Those existent instruments measuring homework behavior can be divided into the following two categories: The single-indicator instruments and the multi-dimension instruments ( Guo and Fan, 2018 ). The single-indicator instruments employ only one item to measure homework attributes, such as homework time (e.g., Trautwein and Lüdtke, 2007 ), homework frequency (e.g., De Jong et al., 2000 ), homework completion (e.g., Xu et al., 2019 ), and effort (e.g., Liu et al., 2013 ).

The typical multi-dimension instruments include Homework Process Inventory ( Cooper et al., 1998 ), Homework Purpose Scale ( Xu, 2010 ), Homework Performance Questionnaire ( Pendergast et al., 2014 ), Homework Management Scale (HMS; Xu and Corno, 2003 ), Homework Evaluating Scale ( Fernández-Alonso et al., 2015 ), Homework Problem Checklist ( Anesko et al., 1987 ), Science Homework Scale ( Tas et al., 2016 ), Homework Expectancy Value Scale ( Yang and Xu, 2017 ), and Online Homework Distraction Scale ( Xu et al., 2020 ).

Although the previous tools measured some dimensions of homework ( Guo and Fan, 2018 ), there is hardly any tool that can be employed to gauge the homework creativity. Guo and Fan (2018) extracted several attributes (i.e., time, completion, quality, purpose, effort, creativity, sociality, liking) represented in the existent instruments of homework behaviors, and put forth a multi-faceted model of homework behaviors which intuitionally predicts the existence of homework creativity.

Under the guideline of the multi-faceted model ( Guo and Fan, 2018 ), Guo (2018) developed a multi-dimensional homework behavior instrument, which detected the homework creativity as a dimension in the homework behavior of middle school students. A typical item of homework creativity in Guo (2018) is “The way I do my homework is different from others.” The subscale homework creativity reported by Guo (2018) needs to be improved because it has a small number of items with lower reliability.

Following Guo’s (2018) work, Chang (2019) conducted a new investigation focusing on homework creativity behavior. Using an open-ended questionnaire, a total of 30 students from primary, middle, and high schools were invited to answer this question, that is, “What characteristics can be considered as creative in the process of completing the homework?” Here, “creativity” refers to novelty, uniqueness, and high quality. A group of 23 specific behaviors were reported, among which the top 10 are as follows: Learning by analogy, open minded, one question with multiple solutions, unique solution, summarizing the cause of errors, constructing a personal understanding, analyzing knowledge points clearly, classifying homework contents, making more applications, having rich imagination, and a neat handwriting (see Chang, 2019 , Table 4 , p. 14). Based on these results of open-ended questionnaire, Chang (2019) invented a nine-item scale (see Table 1 and Supplementary Table S3 for details) called as the HCBS which has a good reliability coefficient (α = 0.87).

Regression analyses of homework creative behavior on academic achievement and general creativity.

AA, academic achievement; WCAPt, total score of WCAP; TWk, time spent on homework in week days; TWw, time spent on homework in weekend; HCp, homework completion; HCb, homework creativity behavior.

Previous studies on the relationship between homework behaviors and academic achievement

In the literature, homework behaviors is one cluster of variables typically including homework time, homework completion, effort, purpose, frequency, etc. Academic achievement is an outcome of homework which is operationally measured using the scores on the standardized tests, or non-standardized tests (including final examinations, or teachers’ grades, or estimations by participants themselves, those forms were used widely in the literature, see Fan et al., 2017 ). Academic achievement may be affected by a lot of factors inherited in the process of learning (see Hattie, 2009 for an overview of its correlates). The relationship between homework behaviors and academic achievement is one of the most important questions in homework field, because it is related to the effectiveness of homework ( Cooper et al., 2006 , 2012 ; Fan et al., 2017 ).

Most of the previous studies focused on the relationship between homework time and academic achievement. Cooper et al. (2006) synthesized the primary studies published from 1989 to 2003, and found that the correlation between homework time of America students and their academic achievement was about 0.15. Fan et al. (2017) reviewed those individual studies published before June 2015, and reported that the averaged correlation between homework time of international students and their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) academic achievement was about 0.20. Fernández-Alonso et al. (2017) investigated a representative sample of Spanish students (more than 26,000), and the results of multi-level analysis indicated that the correlation between homework time and academic achievement was negative at student level, but positive at school level ( r = 0.16). Fernández-Alonso et al. (2019) took a survey on a big sample from 16 countries from Latin America, and reported that the relationship between homework time and academic achievement was very weak. Valle et al. (2019) analyzed the homework time, time management, and achievement of 968 Spain students finding that homework time management was positively related to academic achievement. Taken all these together, we will find that the homework has some small significant correlations with academic achievement, the average r = 0.15.

The correlation between homework completion and academic achievement has also been investigated for decades. Based on a review of 11 primary studies, Fan et al. (2017) reported a high correlation of 0.59 between them. Rosário et al. (2015) investigated 638 students, and demonstrated a correlation of 0.22 between amount of homework completed and math test scores. Xu et al. (2019) took a survey using a sample of 1,450 Chinese eighth graders, and found that the correlations between homework completion and the gains in math test scores ranged from 0.25 to 0.28. Dolean and Lervag (2022) employed the Randomized Controlled Trial design, and demonstrated that amount of homework completed has immediate effect on writing competency in which the effect of moderate amount of homework can last for 4 months. Integrating the aforementioned results, we can find that the averaged correlation between homework completion and academic achievement was higher than that between homework time with academic achievement.

Homework effort was also found to be correlated with academic achievement. Fan et al. (2017) reviewed four primary studies and returned that a medium correlation ( r = 0.31) between homework effort and academic achievement. Two recent investigations showed that this relationship is positively and reciprocally related ( r = 0.41–0.42) ( Xu, 2020 ; Xu et al., 2021 ).

The effect of homework purpose was also correlated with the academic achievement. Fan et al. (2017) summarized four existent primary studies and reported an averaged correlation of 0.11 between them. Later, Rosário et al. (2015) found a similar correlation coefficient of these two variables on a sample of 638 students. Xu’s (2018) investigation revealed that the correlation between purpose and academic achievement was about 0.40. Sun et al. (2021) investigated a larger sample ( N = 1,365), and found that the subscales of homework purpose had different correlation patterns with academic achievement (academic purpose is 0.40, self-regulatory purpose is 0.20, and approval-seeking purpose is 0.10).

Considering the case of homework creativity, there is only one study preliminarily investigated its relationship with academic achievement. Guo (2018) investigated a sample of 1,808 middle school students, and reported a significant correlation between homework creativity and academic achievement ( r = 0.34, p < 0.05).

Previous studies on the relationship between homework behaviors and general creativity

General creativity refers to the psychological attributes which can generate novel and valuable products ( Kaufman and Glăveanu, 2019 ; Sternberg and Karami, 2022 ). These psychological attributes typically included attitude (e.g., willing to take appropriate risk), motivations (e.g., intrinsic motivation, curiosity), abilities (e.g., divergent thinking), and personality (e.g., independence) ( Kaufman and Glăveanu, 2019 ; Long et al., 2022 ). These attributes can be assessed independently, or in the form of grouping ( Plucker et al., 2019 ; Sternberg, 2019 ). For instance, the divergent thinking was measured independently ( Kaufman et al., 2008 ). Also, the willing to take appropriate risk was measured in tools contain other variables ( Williams, 1979 ). There are many studies examined the relationship between learning and general creativity in the past several decades indicating that the correlation between them was around 0.22 (e.g., Gajda et al., 2017 ; Karwowski et al., 2020 ).

Regarding the relationship between homework behaviors and general creativity, there are few studies which presented some contradictory viewpoints. Kaiipob (1951) posited that homework could accelerate development of students’ general creativity disposition, because the tasks in homework provide opportunities to exercise creativity. Cooper et al. (2012) argued that homework can diminish creativity. Furthermore, Zheng (2013) insisted that homework will reduce curiosity and the ability to challenging – the two core components of creativity. The preliminary results of Chang (2019) indicated that the score of HCBS is significantly correlated with scores of a test of general creativity, Williams’ creativity packet ( r = 0.25–0.33, p < 0.05).

Previous studies on the relationship between homework behaviors and homework creativity

In Guo and Fan’s (2018) theoretical work, homework creativity was combined from two independent words, homework and creativity, which was defined as a new attribute of homework process and was considered as a new member of homework behaviors. Up till now, there are two works providing preliminary probe to the relationship between homework behaviors and homework creativity. Guo (2018) investigated a sample of 1808 middle school students, and found that homework creativity was correlated significantly with liking ( r = 0.33), correctness ( r = 0.47), completion ( r = 0.57), and purpose ( r = 0.53). Based on another sample of Chinese students (elementary school students, N = 300; middle school students, N = 518; high school students, N = 386), Chang (2019) showed that the score of homework creativity was correlated significantly with homework time ( r = 0.11), completion ( r = 0.39), correctness ( r = 0.63), effort ( r = 0.73), social interaction ( r = 0.35), quality ( r = 0.69), interpersonal relation purpose ( r = 0.17), and purpose of personal development ( r = 0.41).

Previous studies on grade differences of homework behaviors and general creativity

Grade differences of homework behaviors.

As a useful indicator, homework time was recorded frequently (e.g., Cooper et al., 2006 ; Fan et al., 2017 ). A recent meta-analysis included 172 primary studies (total N = 144,416) published from 2003 to 2019, and demonstrated that time Chinese K-12 students spent on homework increased significantly along with increasing of grades ( Zhai and Fan, 2021 , October).

Regarding homework managing time, some studies reported the grade difference was insignificant. Xu (2006) surveyed 426 middle school students and found that there was no difference between middle school students and high school students. Xu and Corno (2003) reported that urban junior school students ( N = 86) had no grade difference in homework Managing time. Yang and Tu (2020) surveyed 305 Chinese students in grades 7–9, and found that in managing time behavior, the grade differences were insignificant. The rest studies showed that the grade effect is significant. A survey by Xu et al. (2014) based on 1799 Chinese students in grades 10 and 11 showed that the higher level the grade, the lower level of time management.

Grade differences of general creativity

The findings from the previous studies suggested that the scores of general creativity deceases as the grade increases except for some dimensions. Kim (2011) reviewed the Torrance Tests of Creative thinking (TTCT) scores change using five datasets from 1974 to 2008, and reported that three dimensions of creative thinking (i.e., “Fluency,” “Originality,” and “Elaboration”) significantly decreased along with grades increase, while the rest dimension (i.e., “Abstractness of titles”) significantly increased when grades increase. Nie and Zheng (2005) investigated a sample of 3,729 participants from grades 3–12 using the Williams’ Creativity Assessment Packet (WCAP), and reported that the creativity scores decreased from grades 9–12. Said-Metwaly et al. (2021) synthesized 41 primary studies published in the past 60 years, and concluded that the ability of divergent thinking had a whole increase tendency from grades 1 to 12 with a decrease tendency from grades 8 to 11 at the same time.

The purpose and questions of this study

What we have known about homework creativity hitherto is nothing except for its notation and a preliminary version of measurement. To get deeper understanding of homework creativity, this study made an endeavor to examine its relationships with relevant variables based on a confirmation of the reliability and validity of HCBS. Specifically, there are four interrelated research questions, as the following paragraphs (and their corresponding hypotheses) described.

(i) What is the reliability and validity of the HCBS?

Because the earlier version of the HCBS showed a good Cronbach α coefficient of 0.87, and a set of well-fitting indices ( Chang, 2019 ), this study expected that the reliability and validity will also behave well in the current conditions as before. Then, we present the first set of hypotheses as follows:

H1a: The reliability coefficient will equal or greater than 0.80.

H1b: The one-factor model will also fit the current data well; and all indices will reach or over the criteria as the expertise suggested.

(ii) What degree is the score of the HCBS related with academic achievement?

As suggested by the review section, the correlations between homework behaviors and academic achievement ranged from 0.15 and 0.59 (e.g., Fan et al., 2017 ), then we expected that the relationship between homework creativity and academic achievement will fall into this range, because homework creativity is a member of homework behaviors.

The results of the previous studies also demonstrated that the correlation between general creativity and academic achievement changed in a range of 0.19–0.24 with a mean of 0.19 ( Gajda et al., 2017 ). Because it can be treated as a sub-category of general creativity, we predicted that homework creativity will have a similar behavior under the current condition.

Taken aforementioned information together, Hypothesis H2 is presented as follows:

H2: There will be a significant correlation between homework creativity and academic achievement which might fall into the interval of 0.15–0.59.

(iii) What degree is the relationship between HCBS and general creativity?

As discussed in the previous section, there are no inconsistent findings about the relationship between the score of HCBS and general creativity. Some studies postulated that these two variables be positive correlated (e.g., Kaiipob, 1951 ; Chang, 2019 ); other studies argued that this relationship be negative (e.g., Cooper et al., 2012 ; Zheng, 2013 ). Because homework creativity is a sub-category of general creativity, we expected that this relationship would be positive and its value might be equal or less than 0.33. Based on those reasoning, we presented our third hypothesis as follows:

H3: The correlation between homework creativity and general creativity would be equal or less than 0.33.

(iv) What effect does grade have on the HCBS score?

Concerning the grade effect of homework behaviors, the previous findings were contradictory ( Xu et al., 2014 ; Zhai and Fan, 2021 , October). However, the general creativity decreased as the level of grade increases from grade 8 to grade 11 ( Kim, 2011 ; Said-Metwaly et al., 2021 ). Taken these previous findings and the fact that repetitive exercises increase when grades go up ( Zheng, 2013 ), we were inclined to expect that the level of homework creativity is negative correlated with the level of grade. Thus, we presented our fourth hypothesis as follows:

H4: The score of HCBS might decrease as the level of grades goes up.

Materials and methods

Participants.

To get more robust result, this study investigated two convenient samples from six public schools in a medium-sized city in China. Among them, two schools were of high schools (including a key school and a non-key school), and the rest four schools were middle schools (one is key school, and the rest is non-key school). All these schools included here did not have free lunch system and written homework policy. Considering the students were mainly prepared for entrance examination of higher stage, the grades 9 and 12 were excluded in this survey. Consequently, students of grades 7, 8, 10, and 11 were included in our survey. After getting permission of the education bureau of the city investigated, the headmasters administrated the questions in October 2018 (sample 1) and November 2019 (sample 2).

A total of 850 questionnaires were released and the valid number of questionnaires returned is 639 with a valid return rate of 75.18%. Therefore, there were 639 valid participants in sample 1. Among them, there were 273 boys and 366 girls (57.2%); 149 participants from grade 7 (23.31%), 118 from grade 8 (18.47%), 183 from grade 10 (28.64%), and 189 from grade 11 (29.58%); the average age was 15.25 years, with a standard deviation (SD) of 1.73 years. See Table 1 for the information about each grade.

Those participants included received homework assignments every day (see Table 1 for the distribution of homework frequency). During the working days, the averaged homework time was 128.29 minutes with SD = 6.65 minutes. In the weekend, the average homework time was 3.75 hours, with SD = 0.22 hours. The percentage distribution here is similar with that of a national representative sample ( Sun et al., 2020 ), because the values of Chi-squared (χ 2 ) were 7.46 (father) and 8.46 (mother), all p -values were above 0.12 (see Supplementary Table S1 for details).

Another package of 850 questionnaires were released. The valid number of questionnaires returned is 710 with a valid return rate of 83.53%. Among them, there were 366 girls (51.50%); 171 participants from grade 7 (24.23%), 211 from grade 8 (26.06%), 190 from the grade 10 (22.96%), and 216 from grade 11 (26.76%); the average age was 15.06 years, with SD = 1.47 years.

Those participants included received homework assignments almost each day (see Table 1 for details for the distribution of homework frequency). During the working days, the averaged homework time was 123.02 minutes with SD = 6.13 minutes. In weekend, the average homework time was 3.47 hours, with SD = 0.21 hours.

The percentage distribution here is insignificantly different from that of a national representative sample ( Sun et al., 2020 ), because the values of χ 2 were 5.20 (father) and 6.05 (mother), p -values were above 0.30 (see Supplementary Table S1 for details).

Instruments

The homework creativity behavior scale.

The HCBS contains nine items representing students’ creativity behaviors in the process of completing homework (for example, “I do my homework in an innovative way”) ( Chang, 2019 , see Supplementary Table S3 for details). The HCBS employs a 5-point rating scale, where 1 means “completely disagree” and 5 means “completely agree.” The higher the score, the stronger the homework creative behavior students have. The reliability and validity of the HCBS can be found in Section “Reliability and validity of the homework creativity behavior scale” (see Table 2 and Figures 1 , ​ ,2 2 for details).

Results of item discrimination analysis and exploratory factor analysis.

**p < 0.01, two side-tailed. The same for below.

a Correlations for sample 1; b Correlations for sample 2. c Seventh item should be removed away according to the results of CFA (see section “Reliability and validity of the HCBS” for details).

Parallel analysis scree plots of the HCBS data.

The standardized solution for HCBS eight-item model. hcb, homework creativity behavior; it 1∼9, item1 ∼6, 8∼9.

Homework management scale

The HMS contains 22 items describing specific behaviors related to self-management in homework (for example, “I will choose a quiet place to do my homework” or “Tell myself to calm down when encountering difficulties”) ( Xu and Corno, 2003 ; Xu, 2008 ). The HMS employs a 5-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (completely disagree) to 5 (completely agree). All items can be divided into five dimensions, i.e., arranging environment, managing time, focusing attention, monitoring motivation, and monitoring and controlling emotion. Among them, the monitoring and controlling emotion dimension adopts a method of reverse scoring.

Except for the internal consistency of arranging environment in sample 1, which is 0.63, the internal consistency coefficients of the five dimensions based two samples in this study are all greater than 0.7, ranging from 0.70 to 0.79. The Cronbach’s coefficients of the overall HMS-based two samples are 0.88 and 0.87, respectively. The ω coefficients of the dimensions of HMS ranged from 0.64 to 0.80. The ω coefficients of the HMS total scores were 0.88 and 0.87 for samples 1 and 2, respectively. Those reliability coefficients were acceptable for research purpose ( Clark and Watson, 1995 ; Peterson and Kim, 2013 ).

Williams’ creativity assessment packet

The WCAP including a total of 40 items is a revised version to measure general disposition of creativity (for example, “I like to ask some questions out of other’s expectation” or “I like to imagine something novel, even if it looks useless”) ( Williams, 1979 ; Wang and Lin, 1986 ; Liu et al., 2016 ). The WCAP uses a 3-point Likert scales, in which 1 = disagree, 2 = uncertain, and 3 = agree. The higher WCAP score, the higher is the general creativity level. All items of WCAP can be scattered into four dimensions: adventure, curiosity, imagination, and challenge ( Williams, 1979 ; Wang and Lin, 1986 ; Liu et al., 2016 ). In this study, the Cronbach’s α coefficients of adventure, curiosity, imagination, challenge, and total scale are 0.62, 0.71, 0.78, 0.64, and 0.90, respectively. The ω coefficients were in sequence 0.61, 0.70, 0.77, 0.63, and 0.90 for adventure, curiosity, imagination, challenge, and the total score of WCAP. The correlations between the four dimensions of WCAP are between 0.47 and 0.65. The patterns of reliability coefficients and correlations between dimensions are similar to those results reported by the previous studies ( Williams, 1979 ; Wang and Lin, 1986 ; Liu et al., 2016 ) which stand acceptable reliability and validity ( Clark and Watson, 1995 ; Peterson and Kim, 2013 ).

Homework indicators

Homework time.

The participants were asked to report the time spent on homework in the past week. This technique has been employed widely in many international survey programs, such as PISA from OECD (e.g., Trautwein and Lüdtke, 2007 ). The items are as follows: (1) “Every day, from Monday to Friday, in last week, how many minutes you spent on homework?” The options are as follows: (A) 0–30 min; (B) 31–60 min (C) 61–90 min (D) 91–120 min; (E) 121–180 min; (F) 181 min or more. (2) “In last weekend, how many hours you spent on homework?” The options are as follows: (A) 0–1 h; (B) 1.1–3 h; (C) 3.1–5 h; (D) 5.1–7 h; (E) 7.1 h or more.

Homework completion

The homework completion is a useful indicator demonstrated in the previous studies ( Welch et al., 1986 ; Austin, 1988 ; Swank, 1999 ; Pelletier, 2005 ; Wilson, 2010 ), and had large correlation with achievement, as a meta-analytic results suggested ( Fan et al., 2017 ). In the survey of this study, the participants were also asked to estimate a percent of the completion of homework in the past week and fill in the given blank space. It includes three items which are as follows: “What is the percentage of Chinese/Maths/English homework assignment you completed in the last week?” “Please estimate and write a number from 0 to 100 in the blank space.”

Academic achievement

To record the academic achievement, an item required participants to make a choice based on their real scores of tests, not estimate their tests scores. The item is, “In the last examination, what is the rank of your score in your grade?” (A) The first 2%; (B) The first 3–13%; (C) The first 14–50%; (D) The first 51–84%; (E) The last 16%. The options here correspond to the percentage in the normal distribution, it is convenient to compute a Z -score for each student.

The method employed here is effective to retrieve participants’ test scores. First, the self-report method is more effective than other method under the condition of anonymous investigation. To our knowledge, participants do not have the will to provide their real information in the real name format. Second, this method transforms test scores from different sources into the same space of norm distribution which benefits the comparisons. Third, the validity of this method has been supported by empirical data. Using another sample ( N = 234), we got the academic achievement they reported and real test scores their teacher recorded. The correlation between ranks self-reported and the real scores from Chinese test were r = 0.81, p < 0.001; and the correlation coefficient for mathematics was also large, i.e., r = 0.79, p < 0.001.

Data collection procedure

There are three phases in data collection. The first one is the design stage. At this stage, the corresponding author of this study designed the study content, prepared the survey tools, and got the ethical approve of this project authorized from research ethic committee of school the corresponding author belongs to.

The second stage is to releasing questionnaire prepared. The questionnaire was distributed and retrieved by the head master of those classes involved. Neither the teachers nor the students knew the purpose of this research. During this stage, students can stop answering at any time, or simply withdraw from the survey. None of the teachers and students in this study received payment.

The third stage is the data entry stage. At this stage, the corresponding author of this study recruited five volunteers majored in psychology and education, and explained to them the coding rules, missing value processing methods, identification of invalid questionnaires, and illustrated how to deal with these issues. The volunteers used the same data template for data entry. The corresponding author of this study controlled the data entry quality by selective check randomly.

Data analysis strategies

R packages employed.

The “psych” package in R environment ( R Core Team, 2019 ) was employed to do descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, mean difference comparisons, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), reliability Analysis ( Revelle, 2022 ); and the “lavaan” package was used in confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and measurement invariance test ( Rosseel, 2012 ); and the “semPlot” package was employed to draw the picture of CFA’s outputs ( Epskamp et al., 2022 ).

Analysis strategies of exploratory factor analysis and reliability

Sample 1 was used for item analysis, EFA, reliability analysis. In EFA, factors were extracted using maximum likelihood, and the promax method served as the rotation method. The number of factors were determined according to the combination of the results from screen plot, and the rule of Eigenvalues exceeding 1.0, and parallel analysis ( Luo et al., 2019 ).

The Cronbach’s α and MacDonald’s ω test were employed to test the reliability of the scale. The rigorous criteria that α ≥ 0.70 ( Nunnally and Bernstein, 1994 ) and ω ≥ 0.7 ( Green and Yang, 2015 ) were taken as acceptable level of the reliability of HCBS.

Analysis strategies of confirmatory factor analysis

As suggested by Hu and Bentler (1999) , two absolute goodness-of-fit indices, namely, the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) and the standardized root mean square residual (SRMR), and two relative goodness-of-fit indices, namely, comparative fit index (CFI) and Tucker–Lewis Index (TLI) were recruited as fitting indicators. The absolute goodness-of-fit indices are less than 0.08, and the relative goodness-of-fit indices greater than 0.90 are considered as a good fit. The CFA was conducted using the second sample.

Strategies for measurement invariance

Measurement invariance testing included four models, they are Configural invariance (Model 1), which is to test whether the composition of latent variables between different groups is the same; Weak invariance (Factor loading invariance, Model 2), which is to test whether the factor loading is equal among the groups; Intercept invariance (Model 3), that is, whether the intercepts of the observed variables are equal; Strict equivalent (Residual Variance invariance, Model 4), that is, to test whether the error variances between different groups are equal ( Chen, 2007 ; Putnick and Bornstein, 2016 ).

Since the χ 2 test will be affected easily by the sample size, even small differences will result in significant differences as the sample size will increase. Therefore, this study used the changes of model fitting index CFI, RMSEA, and SRMR (ΔCFI, ΔRMSEA, and ΔSRMR) to evaluate the invariance of the measurement. When ΔCFI ≤ 0.010, ΔRMSEA ≤ 0.015, and ΔSRMR ≤ 0.030 (for metric invariance) or 0.015 (for scalar or residual invariance), the invariance model is considered acceptable ( Cheung and Rensvold, 2002 ; Chen, 2007 ; Putnick and Bornstein, 2016 ).

Strategies of controlling common methods biases

The strategy of controlling common methods biases is mainly hided in the directions. Each part of the printed questionnaire had a sub-direction which invites participants answer the printed questions honestly. The answer formats between any two neighboring parts were different from each other which requested participants change their mind in time. For example, on some part, the answering continuum varied from “1 = totally disagreed” to “5 = total agreed,” while the answering continuum on the neighboring part is the from “5 = totally disagreed” to “1 = total agreed.” Additionally, according to the suggestion of the previous studies, the one factor CFA model and the bi-factor model can be used to detect the common methods biases (e.g., Podsakoff et al., 2012 ).

Detection of common method biases

The fitting results of the one-common-factor model using CFA technique were as follows: χ 2 = 15,073, df = 3320, p < 0.001; χ 2 / df = 4.54, CFI = 0.323, TLI = 0.306, RMSEA = 0.071, 90% CI: 0.070–0.072, and SRMR = 0.101. The results of the bi-factor model under CFA framework were presented as follows: χ 2 = 2,225.826, df = 117, p < 0.001; χ 2 / df = 19.024, CFI = 0.650, TLI = 0.543, RMSEA = 0.159, 90% CI: 0.154–0.164, and SRMR = 0.127. These poor indices of the two models suggested that the one-common-factor model failed to fit the data well and that the biases of common method be ignored ( Podsakoff et al., 2012 ).

Reliability and validity of the homework creativity behavior scale

Item analysis.

Based on the sample 1, the correlation coefficients between the items of the HCBS were between 0.34 and 0.64, p -values were below 0.01. The correlations between the items and the total score of HCBS vary from 0.54 to 0.75 ( p -values are below 0.01). On the condition of sample 2, the correlations between the items fluctuate between 0.31 and 0.58, the correlation coefficients between the items and the total score of the HCBS change from 0.63 to 0.75 ( p -values were below 0.01). All correlation coefficients between items and total score are larger than those between items and reached the criterion suggested ( Ferketich, 1991 ; see Table 2 for details).

Results of exploratory factor analysis

The EFA results (based on sample 1) showed that the KMO was 0.89, and the χ 2 of Bartlett’s test = 1,666.07, p < 0.01. The rules combining eigenvalue larger than 1 and the results of parallel analysis (see Figure 1 for details) suggested that one factor should be extracted. The eigenvalue of the factor extracted was 3.63. The average variance extracted was 0.40. This factor accounts 40% variance with factor loadings fluctuating from 0.40 to 0.76 (see Table 2 ).

Results of confirmatory factor analysis

In the CFA situation (based on sample 2) the fitting indices of the nine-item model of the HCBS are acceptable marginally, they are χ 2 = 266.141; df = 27; χ 2 / df = 9.857; CFI = 0.904; TLI = 0.872; RMSEA = 0.112; 90% CI: 0.100–0.124; SRMR = 0.053.

The modification indices of item 7 were too big (MI value = 74.339, p < 0.01), so it is necessary to consider to delete item 7. Considering its content of “I designed a neat, clean and clear homework format by myself,” item 7 is an indicator of strictness which is weakly linked with creativity. Therefore, the item 7 should be deleted.

After removing item 7, the fitting results were, χ 2 = 106.111; df = 20; χ 2 / df = 5.306; CFI = 0.957; TLI = 0.939; RMSEA = 0.078; 90% CI: 0.064–0.093; SRMR = 0.038). The changes of the fitting indices of the two nested models (eight-item vs. nine-item models) are presented as follows: Δχ 2 = 160.03, Δ df = 7, χ 2 (α = 0.01, df = 7) = 18.48, p < 0.05. After deleting item 7, both CFI and TLI indices increased to above 0.93, and RMSEAs decreased below 0.08 which suggested that the factor model on which eight items loaded fitted the data well. The average variance extracted was 0.50 which is adequate according to the criteria suggested by Fornell and Larcker (1981) . The standardized solution for the eight-item model of the HCBS was shown in Figure 2 .

Correlations between the homework creativity behavior scale and similar concepts

The results showed that the score of the HCBS was significantly correlated with the total score and four dimensions of WCAP and their correlation coefficients ranged from 0.20 to 0.29, p -values were below 0.01. Similarly, the correlations between the score of the HCBS and the scores of arranging environment, managing time, motivation management, and controlling emotion, and total score of the HMS ranged from 0.08 to 0.22, p -values were 0.01; at the meanwhile, the correlation between the score of HCBS and the distraction dimension of the HMS was r = –0.14, p -values were 0.01. The HCBS score was also significantly related to homework completion ( r = 0.18, p < 0.01), but insignificantly related to homework time (see Table 3 for details).

Correlation matrix between variables included and the corresponding descriptive statistics.

About correlation between variables, the results of sample 1 and sample 2 were presented in the lower, upper triangle, respectively.

a In analyses, grades 7, 8, 10, and 11 were valued 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively.

b TWk, the time spent on homework in the weekend; TWw, the time spent on homework from Monday to Friday; HCp, homework completion; HMSt, total score of homework management scale; AE, arrange environment; MT, manage time; MM, monitor motivation; CE, control emotion; FA, focus attention; WCAPt, WCAP total score; AD, adventure; CU, curiosity; IM, imagination; CH, challenging; HCb, homework creativity behavior; AA, academic achievement.

c Since sample 1 did not answer the WCAP, so the corresponding cells in the lower triangle are blank. *p < 0.05, two side-tailed, the same for below.

d Since there is only one item from variable 1 to 4, the α and ω coefficients cannot be computed.

Correlations between the homework creativity behavior scale and distinct concepts

The correlation analysis results demonstrated that both the correlation coefficients between the score of HCBS and the time spent on homework in week days, and time spent on in weekend days were insignificant ( r -values = 0.02, p -values were above 0.05), which indicated a non-overlap between two distinct constructs of homework creativity and time spent on homework.

Reliability analyses

The results revealed that both the Cronbach’s α coefficients of sample 1 and sample 2 were 0.86, which were greater than a 0.70 criteria the previous studies suggest ( Nunnally and Bernstein, 1994 ; Green and Yang, 2015 ).

Effect of homework creativity on academic achievement

The results (see Table 4 ) of hierarchical regression analyses demonstrated that (1) gender and grade explained 0.8% variation of the score of academic achievement. This number means closing to zero because the regression equation failed to pass the significance test; (2) homework time and completion explained 5.4% variation of academic achievement; considering the β coefficients of the time spent on homework is insignificant, this contribution should be attributed to homework completion totally, and (3) the score of the HCBS explained 3.7% variation of the academic achievement independently.

Effect of homework creativity on general creativity

The results showed the following (see Table 4 for details):

(1) Gender and grade explained 1.3% variation of the total score of general creativity (i.e., the total score of WACP); homework time and completion explained 1.3% variation of the total score of general creativity disposition; and the score of the HCBS independently explained 7.0% variation of the total score of general creativity.

(2) Gender and grade explained 1.7% variation of the adventure score, and homework time and completion explained 1.6% variation of the adventure score, and the score of the HCBS independently explained 6.4% variation of the adventure score.

(3) Gender and grade explained 2.4% variation of the curiosity score, and homework time and completion explained 1.1% variation of the curiosity score, and the score of the HCBS independently explained 5.1% variation of the curiosity score.

(4) Gender and grade explained 0.3% variation of the imagination score, homework time completion explained 0.3% variation of the imagination score. The real values of the two “0.3%” are zeros because both the regression equations and coefficients failed to pass the significance tests. Then the score of the HCBS independently explained 4.4% variation of the imagination score.

(5) Gender and grade explained 0.3% variation of the score of the challenge dimension, homework time and completion explained 2.3% variation of the challenge score, and the score of the HCBS independently explained 4.9% variation of the challenge score.

Grade differences of the homework creativity behavior scale

Test of measurement invariance.

The results of measurement invariance test across four grades indicated the following:

(1) The fitting states of the four models (Configural invariance, Factor loading invariance, Intercept invariance, and Residual variance invariance) were marginally acceptable, because values of CFIs (ranged from 0.89 to 0.93), TLIs (varied from 0.91 to 0.93), RMSEAs (fluctuated from 0.084 to 0.095), and SRMRs (changed from 0.043 to 0.074) located the cutoff intervals suggested by methodologists ( Cheung and Rensvold, 2002 ; Chen, 2007 ; Putnick and Bornstein, 2016 ; see Table 5 for fitting indices, and refer to Supplementary Table S2 for the estimation of parameters).

Fitting results of invariance tests across grades.

(2) When setting factor loadings equal across four grades (i.e., grades 7, 8, 10, and 11), the ΔCFA was –0.006, ΔRMSEA was –0.007, and ΔSRMR was 0.016 which indicated that it passed the test of factor loading invariance. After adding the limit of intercepts equal across four groups, the ΔCFA was –0.008, ΔRMSEA was –0.004, and the ΔSRMR was 0.005 which supported that it passed the test of intercept invariance. At the last step, the error variances were also added as equal, the ΔCFA was –0.027, ΔRMSEA was 0.005, and the ΔSRMR was 0.019 which failed to pass the test of residual variance invariance (see Table 5 for changes of fitting indices). Taking into these fitting indices into account, the subsequent comparisons between the means of factors can be conducted because the residuals are not part of the latent factor ( Cheung and Rensvold, 2002 ; Chen, 2007 ; Putnick and Bornstein, 2016 ).

Grade differences in homework creativity and general creativity

The results of ANOVA showed that there were significant differences in the HCBS among the four grades [ F (3,1345) = 27.49, p < 0.001, η 2 = 0.058, see Table 6 for details]. Further post-test tests returned that the scores of middle school students were significantly higher than those of high school students (Cohen’s d values ranged from 0.46 to 0.54; the averaged Cohen’s d = 0.494), and no significant difference occurs between grades 7 and 8, or between grades 10 and 11. See Figure 3 for details.

Grade differences in HCBS.

***p < 0.001.

The mean differences of the HCBS between the groups of grades.

To address the gap in the previous research on homework creativity, this study examined the psychometric proprieties of the HCBS and its relationship with academic achievement and general creativity. The main findings were (1) Hypotheses H1a and H1b were supported that the reliability and validity of the HCBS were acceptable; (2) Hypothesis H2 was supported that the correlation between the score of the HCBS and academic achievement was significant ( r -values = 0.23–0.26 for two samples); (3) Hypothesis H3 received support that the correlation between the scores of HCBS and WCAP was significant ( r -values = 0.20–0.29 for two samples); and (4) the H4 was supported from the current data that the score of high school students’ was lower than that of the middle school students’ (Cohen’s d = 0.49).

The positive correlations among homework creativity, homework completion, and general creativity

The first key finding should be noted is that the positive correlations with between pairs of homework creativity, homework completion, and general creativity. This result is inconsistent with prediction of an argument that homework diminishes creativity ( Cooper et al., 2012 ; Zheng, 2013 ). Specifically, the correlation between homework completion and curiosity was insignificant ( r = 0.08, p > 0.05) which did not support the argument that homework hurts curiosity of creativity ( Zheng, 2013 ). The possible reason may be homework can provide opportunities to foster some components of creativity by independently finding and developing new ways of understanding what students have learned in class, as Kaiipob (1951) argued. It may be the homework creativity that served as the way to practice the components of general creativity. In fact, the content of items of the HCBS are highly related with creative thinking (refer to Table 2 for details).

Possible reasons of the grade effect of the score of the homework creativity behavior scale

The second key finding should be noted is that the score of the HCBS decreased as the level of grades increased from 7 to 11. This is consistent with the basic trend recorded in the previous meta-analyses ( Kim, 2011 ; Said-Metwaly et al., 2021 ). There are three possible explanations leading to this grade effect. The first one is the repetitive exercises in homework. As Zheng (2013) observed, to get higher scores in the highly competitive entrance examination of high school and college, those Chinese students chose to practice a lot of repetitive exercises. The results of some behavior experiments suggested that repetitive activity could reduce the diverse thinking of subjects’ (e.g., Main et al., 2020 ). Furthermore, the repetitive exercises would lead to fast habituation (can be observed by skin conductance records) which hurts the creative thinking of participants ( Martindale et al., 1996 ). The second explanation is that the stress level in Chinese high schools is higher than in middle school because of the college entrance examination. The previous studies (e.g., Beversdorf, 2018 ) indicated that the high level of stress will trigger the increase activity of the noradrenergic system and the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis which could debase the individual’s performance of creativity. Another likely explanation is the degree of the certainty of the college entrance examination. The level of certainty highly increases (success or failure) when time comes closer to the deadline of the entrance examination. The increase of degree of certainty will lead to the decrease of activity of the brain areas related to curiosity (e.g., Jepma et al., 2012 ).

The theoretical implications

From the theoretical perspective, there are two points deserving to be emphasized. First, the findings of this study extended the previous work ( Beghetto and Kaufman, 2007 ; Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009 ). This study revealed that homework creativity had two typical characteristics, including the personal meaning of students (as represented by the content of items of the HCBS) and the small size of “creativity” and limited in the scope of exercises (small correlations with general creativity). These characteristics are in line with what Mini-C described by the previous studies ( Beghetto and Kaufman, 2007 ; Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009 ). Second, this study deepened our understanding of the relationship between learning (homework is a part of learning) and creativity which has been discussed more than half a century. One of the main viewpoints is learning and creativity share some fundamental similarities, but no one explained what is the content of these “fundamental similarities” (e.g., Gajda et al., 2017 ). This study identified one similarity between learning and creativity in the context of homework, that is homework creativity. Homework creativity has the characteristics of homework and creativity at the same time which served as an inner factor in which homework promote creativity.

The practical implications

The findings in this study also have several potential practical implications. First, homework creativity should be a valuable goal of learning, because homework creativity may make contributions to academic achievement and general creativity simultaneously. They accounted for a total of 10.7% variance of academic achievement and general creativity which are the main goals of learning. Therefore, it is valuable to imbed homework creativity as a goal of learning, especially in the Chinese society ( Zheng, 2013 ).

Second, the items of the HCBS can be used as a vehicle to help students how to develop about homework creativity. Some studies indicated that the creative performance of students will improve just only under the simple requirement of “to be creative please” ( Niu and Sternberg, 2003 ). Similarly, some simple requirements, like “to do your homework in an innovative way,” “don’t stick to what you learned in class,” “to use a simpler method to do your homework,” “to use your imagination when you do homework,” “to design new problems on the basis what learnt,” “to find your own unique insights into your homework,” and “to find multiple solutions to the problem,” which rewritten from the items of the HCBS, can be used in the process of directing homework of students. In fact, these directions are typical behaviors of creative teaching (e.g., Soh, 2000 ); therefore, they are highly possible to be effective.

Third, the HCBS can be used to measure the degree of homework creativity in ordinary teaching or experimental situations. As demonstrated in the previous sections, the reliability and validity of the HCBS were good enough to play such a role. Based on this tool, the educators can collect the data of homework creativity, and make scientific decisions to improve the performance of people’s teaching or learning.

Strengths, limitations, and issues for further investigation

The main contribution is that this study accumulated some empirical knowledge about the relationship among homework creativity, homework completion, academic achievement, and general creativity, as well as the psychometric quality of the HCBS. However, the findings of this study should be treated with cautions because of the following limitations. First, our study did not collect the test–retest reliability of the HCBS. This makes it difficult for us to judge the HCBS’s stability over time. Second, the academic achievement data in our study were recorded by self-reported methods, and the objectivity may be more accurate. Third, the lower reliability coefficients existed in two dimensions employed, i.e., the arrange environment of the HMS (the α coefficient was 0.63), and the adventure of the WCAP (the α coefficient was 0.61). Fourth, the samples included here was not representative enough if we plan to generalize the finding to the population of middle and high school students in main land of China.

In addition to those questions listed as laminations, there are a number of issues deserve further examinations. (1) Can these findings from this study be generalized into other samples, especially into those from other cultures? For instances, can the reliability and validity of the HCBS be supported by the data from other samples? Or can the grade effect of the score of the HCBS be observed in other societies? Or can the correlation pattern among homework creativity, homework completion, and academic achievement be reproduced in other samples? (2) What is the role of homework creativity in the development of general creativity? Through longitudinal study, we can systematically observe the effect of homework creativity on individual’s general creativity, including creative skills, knowledge, and motivation. The micro-generating method ( Kupers et al., 2018 ) may be used to reveal how the homework creativity occurs in the learning process. (3) What factors affect homework creativity? Specifically, what effects do the individual factors (e.g., gender) and environmental factors (such as teaching styles of teachers) play in the development of homework creativity? (4) What training programs can be designed to improve homework creativity? What should these programs content? How about their effect on the development of homework creativity? What should the teachers do, if they want to promote creativity in their work situation? All those questions call for further explorations.

Homework is a complex thing which might have many aspects. Among them, homework creativity was the latest one being named ( Guo and Fan, 2018 ). Based on the testing of its reliability and validity, this study explored the relationships between homework creativity and academic achievement and general creativity, and its variation among different grade levels. The main findings of this study were (1) the eight-item version of the HCBS has good validity and reliability which can be employed in the further studies; (2) homework creativity had positive correlations with academic achievement and general creativity; (3) compared with homework completion, homework creativity made greater contribution to general creativity, but less to academic achievement; and (4) the score of homework creativity of high school students was lower than that of middle school students. Given that this is the first investigation, to our knowledge, that has systematically tapped into homework creativity, there is a critical need to pursue this line of investigation further.

Data availability statement

Ethics statement.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the research ethic committee, School of Educational Science, Bohai University. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin.

Author contributions

HF designed the research, collected the data, and interpreted the results. YM and SG analyzed the data and wrote the manuscript. HF, JX, and YM revised the manuscript. YC and HF prepared the HCBS. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Liwei Zhang for his supports in collecting data, and Lu Qiao, Dounan Lu, Xiao Zhang for their helps in the process of inputting data.

This work was supported by the LiaoNing Revitalization Talents Program (grant no. XLYC2007134) and the Funding for Teaching Leader of Bohai University.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.923882/full#supplementary-material

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More than two hours of homework may be counterproductive, research suggests.

A Stanford education researcher found that too much homework can negatively affect kids, especially their lives away from school, where family, friends and activities matter.   "Our findings on the effects of homework challenge the traditional assumption that homework is inherently good," wrote Denise Pope , a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a co-author of a study published in the Journal of Experimental Education .   The researchers used survey data to examine perceptions about homework, student well-being and behavioral engagement in a sample of 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class California communities. Along with the survey data, Pope and her colleagues used open-ended answers to explore the students' views on homework.   Median household income exceeded $90,000 in these communities, and 93 percent of the students went on to college, either two-year or four-year.   Students in these schools average about 3.1 hours of homework each night.   "The findings address how current homework practices in privileged, high-performing schools sustain students' advantage in competitive climates yet hinder learning, full engagement and well-being," Pope wrote.   Pope and her colleagues found that too much homework can diminish its effectiveness and even be counterproductive. They cite prior research indicating that homework benefits plateau at about two hours per night, and that 90 minutes to two and a half hours is optimal for high school.   Their study found that too much homework is associated with:   • Greater stress : 56 percent of the students considered homework a primary source of stress, according to the survey data. Forty-three percent viewed tests as a primary stressor, while 33 percent put the pressure to get good grades in that category. Less than 1 percent of the students said homework was not a stressor.   • Reductions in health : In their open-ended answers, many students said their homework load led to sleep deprivation and other health problems. The researchers asked students whether they experienced health issues such as headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss and stomach problems.   • Less time for friends, family and extracurricular pursuits : Both the survey data and student responses indicate that spending too much time on homework meant that students were "not meeting their developmental needs or cultivating other critical life skills," according to the researchers. Students were more likely to drop activities, not see friends or family, and not pursue hobbies they enjoy.   A balancing act   The results offer empirical evidence that many students struggle to find balance between homework, extracurricular activities and social time, the researchers said. Many students felt forced or obligated to choose homework over developing other talents or skills.   Also, there was no relationship between the time spent on homework and how much the student enjoyed it. The research quoted students as saying they often do homework they see as "pointless" or "mindless" in order to keep their grades up.   "This kind of busy work, by its very nature, discourages learning and instead promotes doing homework simply to get points," said Pope, who is also a co-founder of Challenge Success , a nonprofit organization affiliated with the GSE that conducts research and works with schools and parents to improve students' educational experiences..   Pope said the research calls into question the value of assigning large amounts of homework in high-performing schools. Homework should not be simply assigned as a routine practice, she said.   "Rather, any homework assigned should have a purpose and benefit, and it should be designed to cultivate learning and development," wrote Pope.   High-performing paradox   In places where students attend high-performing schools, too much homework can reduce their time to foster skills in the area of personal responsibility, the researchers concluded. "Young people are spending more time alone," they wrote, "which means less time for family and fewer opportunities to engage in their communities."   Student perspectives   The researchers say that while their open-ended or "self-reporting" methodology to gauge student concerns about homework may have limitations – some might regard it as an opportunity for "typical adolescent complaining" – it was important to learn firsthand what the students believe.   The paper was co-authored by Mollie Galloway from Lewis and Clark College and Jerusha Conner from Villanova University.

Clifton B. Parker is a writer at the Stanford News Service .

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Stanford research shows pitfalls of homework

A Stanford researcher found that students in high-achieving communities who spend too much time on homework experience more stress, physical health problems, a lack of balance and even alienation from society. More than two hours of homework a night may be counterproductive, according to the study.

Education scholar Denise Pope has found that too much homework has negative effects on student well-being and behavioral engagement. (Image credit: L.A. Cicero)

A Stanford researcher found that too much homework can negatively affect kids, especially their lives away from school, where family, friends and activities matter.

“Our findings on the effects of homework challenge the traditional assumption that homework is inherently good,” wrote Denise Pope , a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a co-author of a study published in the Journal of Experimental Education .

The researchers used survey data to examine perceptions about homework, student well-being and behavioral engagement in a sample of 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class California communities. Along with the survey data, Pope and her colleagues used open-ended answers to explore the students’ views on homework.

Median household income exceeded $90,000 in these communities, and 93 percent of the students went on to college, either two-year or four-year.

Students in these schools average about 3.1 hours of homework each night.

“The findings address how current homework practices in privileged, high-performing schools sustain students’ advantage in competitive climates yet hinder learning, full engagement and well-being,” Pope wrote.

Pope and her colleagues found that too much homework can diminish its effectiveness and even be counterproductive. They cite prior research indicating that homework benefits plateau at about two hours per night, and that 90 minutes to two and a half hours is optimal for high school.

Their study found that too much homework is associated with:

• Greater stress: 56 percent of the students considered homework a primary source of stress, according to the survey data. Forty-three percent viewed tests as a primary stressor, while 33 percent put the pressure to get good grades in that category. Less than 1 percent of the students said homework was not a stressor.

• Reductions in health: In their open-ended answers, many students said their homework load led to sleep deprivation and other health problems. The researchers asked students whether they experienced health issues such as headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss and stomach problems.

• Less time for friends, family and extracurricular pursuits: Both the survey data and student responses indicate that spending too much time on homework meant that students were “not meeting their developmental needs or cultivating other critical life skills,” according to the researchers. Students were more likely to drop activities, not see friends or family, and not pursue hobbies they enjoy.

A balancing act

The results offer empirical evidence that many students struggle to find balance between homework, extracurricular activities and social time, the researchers said. Many students felt forced or obligated to choose homework over developing other talents or skills.

Also, there was no relationship between the time spent on homework and how much the student enjoyed it. The research quoted students as saying they often do homework they see as “pointless” or “mindless” in order to keep their grades up.

“This kind of busy work, by its very nature, discourages learning and instead promotes doing homework simply to get points,” Pope said.

She said the research calls into question the value of assigning large amounts of homework in high-performing schools. Homework should not be simply assigned as a routine practice, she said.

“Rather, any homework assigned should have a purpose and benefit, and it should be designed to cultivate learning and development,” wrote Pope.

High-performing paradox

In places where students attend high-performing schools, too much homework can reduce their time to foster skills in the area of personal responsibility, the researchers concluded. “Young people are spending more time alone,” they wrote, “which means less time for family and fewer opportunities to engage in their communities.”

Student perspectives

The researchers say that while their open-ended or “self-reporting” methodology to gauge student concerns about homework may have limitations – some might regard it as an opportunity for “typical adolescent complaining” – it was important to learn firsthand what the students believe.

The paper was co-authored by Mollie Galloway from Lewis and Clark College and Jerusha Conner from Villanova University.

Fact-based journalism that sparks the Canadian conversation

How Schools Can Stop Killing Creativity

With the world in crisis, it's more urgent than ever for students to develop original thinking.

A t Douglas Park Elementary School in Regina, Saskatchewan, twelve-year-old Chloe wanted to learn about her ancestors.

She went online to find a genealogy website, but ran into various difficulties—some cost money, and others didn’t have the answers she sought. Undeterred, she tried a different strategy. She went to her grandparents’ house to interview them about their family his- tory, plotting their memories into a family tree of her own crafting.

In the very same Grade 7 class, Isaac—a boy who has always loved video games—decided to build one of his own with a friend. He already knew a bit of coding, but creating a video game would require him to master a new, more complex program. By the end of the term, he had developed a chase game where his characters jumped and leaped across a background of houses, trees, and a terrain that shifted as they moved.

Chloe and Isaac were self-taught, working on projects they themselves dreamed up. Behind their creative exploration was a teacher, Aaron Warner. Warner has built creativity into his classroom. “Genius Hour” is dedicated time for his students to pursue anything about which they are passionate, learning in their own way. It is loosely based on the model developed at Google, where software engineers were expected to spend up to 20 percent of their paid time working on their own ideas. “Twenty-percent time” projects led to the development of Gmail and Adsense, the advertising software that contributes approximately a quarter of the company’s vast revenue. Warner’s Genius Hour builds the same principle into the classroom, with students devoting two hours a week to their creative endeavours.

Warner learned about Genius Hour through his online professional learning community, comprised of educators from across the country and as far away as Australia. Every summer, Warner and his group read a book and discuss it on Twitter. Their first book was A.J. Juliani’s Innovation and Inquiry in the Classroom , which addresses what the media sometimes call a “creativity crisis.” It provides practical guidance to teachers trying to implement Genius Hour projects in their classrooms, from harnessing the support of other teachers, parents and students who think “this is awesome,” to reassuring those whose position is “this is great, but…”, to reaching out to those who think “this is crazy.”

As they engaged with the book, the teachers in the online community wrestled with various questions. If they encouraged students to do self-directed work, how would they assess it? Should students get a mark for following their passions? If they did not, how would they as teachers communicate students’ learning to their school leadership and to parents? The group discussed highlighting some of the skills built into, and exercised through, creative endeavours, like non-fiction writing and research skills, to demonstrate what their students were learning. As their summer of discussion came to a close, a group of teachers, including Warner, committed to adopting Genius Hour.

When he brought Genius Hour into the classroom, Warner had imagined that “magic would take place,” but when he invited students to do whatever they wanted, telling them “the sky’s the limit,” their first question was: “What do you want me to do?” Often, contemporary teaching emphasizes clear, measureable outcomes, detailed rubrics and step-by-step directions. The goal may be transparency, to break tasks down and to help students learn to self-assess, but often it can feel like students are being schooled in following instructions. In this context, it is a bit unsettling to be told: “You can do anything you want to.”

It was a pretty big hurdle. Warner went back to his Twitter community to ask for examples of what was happening in their classrooms. A high school science teacher shared a list of Genius Hour projects from his class that included understanding the circulatory system of a horse, how babies form inside the belly, how to build a small engine, how brain cancer spreads, how to improve hand–eye coordination, and what causes us to forget, as well as contemplating whether Big Foot exists (which included studying the history of the myth). That teacher confessed that not all of the ideas were particularly good ones, but he thought that having students learn that fact for themselves—experience failure and move on—was an important part of the hour.

The kids in Warner’s class came up with their own ideas—although at first they were not particularly ambitious. One student wanted to learn to serve a volleyball. Another wanted to learn how to make Rice Krispies squares. But with practice and encouragement over the course of the year, the kids started to think bigger. Some of the students were most enthusiastic about what they could teach each other, and how to make learning exciting. One student borrowed the school board’s projection tent to use as a mini-planetarium in order to teach her classmates about black holes.

The more they discovered their own potential, the more excited the students grew. And in year two, with a new group of students who had heard about the previous year’s class and had had a chance to wrap their heads around the idea, the start-up period was much shorter. It wasn’t just the kids who were paying attention. The other Grade 7/8 teacher incorporated Genius Hour into her classroom, and then the Grade 6/7 teachers tasked their students with developing self-directed “action plans” as a part of their health curriculum. Warner started working with teachers across the school division through a twice-yearly professional development “EdCamp,” where he supports them in bringing Genius Hour into their schools.

There is a sense of urgency around Warner’s innovative class-room projects. Genius Hour exercises skills often underused and undervalued in our education system: it allows students to stretch their imaginations, follow their own whims and curiosities, and define their own measures of achievement. It helps kids find different ways to succeed at an age when many are struggling with what success means. Genius Hour provides them with an opportunity to achieve outside the traditional borders of academia, and can actually bolster their confidence and engagement in the classroom.

The other reason Warner is committed to making space for creativity in the classroom is related to the larger world. Creativity is a vital life skill. It doesn’t just enrich day-to-day life; it is key to job-readiness in the broadest sense. As Warner notes, “Sixty percent of the jobs of the future haven’t been invented yet.”

This insight echoes Sir Ken Robinson’s argument, in the most-watched TED Talk of all time, titled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”. Robinson made the case that creativity is central to developing education that will “take us into a future we can’t grasp.” Robinson believes that we must take seriously the fact that we cannot know what the world will look like. He is an advocate for school systems where creativity is considered as important as literacy and afforded the same status. There is an urgent need for original thinking to solve current and future problems—and original work will not happen unless children are prepared both to take risks and to put the tremendous talents with which they are born to use.

T he standard definition of creativity is the generation of novel ideas or products. Creativity has also been defined as openness to exploration and as divergent thinking, which is the ability to generate numerous, diverse options or solutions. Creativity exists across traditional academic disciplines. While you can easily identify it in the fine arts, creativity is also a key aspect of domains as wide-ranging as business strategy, mathematical theory, and cooking.

Creativity is recognized as a critical “twenty-first century skill” by business groups, arts groups and international organizations like UNESCO and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ( OECD ). It is seen as essential to a rich and satisfying life, to the generation of new art and useful technologies, and to the solution of the world’s problems. Exercising creativity can also help to better prepare us emotionally for the unpredictable—training us to innovate and problem-solve on the fly, and strengthening our ability to take calculated risks.

Before becoming an international intellectual celebrity, Sir Ken Robinson chaired a national committee tasked with reviewing creativity and culture in British education. The resulting report, All Our Futures , wrestled with the challenges of trying to institutionalize creativity in the school system. Part of the challenge, the committee acknowledged, was achieving widespread recognition of creativity’s importance—another was determining how to actively change practices in schools. In an education environment dominated by test scores, boosting the status of creativity as one of schools’ core activities means working hard to challenge the primacy of measurable outcomes in the education system.

This process is not simple—it requires, for example, an approach to assessment that encourages students to make mistakes. You can’t “teach” creativity standing in front of a classroom, and “judging” a creative process or output is more complicated than marking a test. And there are differences in how people perceive creativity. To be creative, does something have to be completely original? In order to teach creativity, must schools mandate that their students produce a breakthrough in existing knowledge, or is a more permissive definition of creativity possible?

James Kaufman and Ronald Beghetto, cognitive psychologists who work at the University of Connecticut, are best known for developing a scale for creative acts, and in 2010 they co-edited Nurturing Creativity in the Classroom . Kaufman has been a leader in the study of creativity as a core aspect of psychology, and Beghetto has specialized in studying creativity in the classroom.

Their scale begins with what they call “mini-c creativity”: essentially, the pursuit of a creative project for personal enrichment. One step up is “little-c creativity,” which involves some mastery of a creative process. “Pro-c creativity” refers to creativity conducted on a professional level: graphic design; architecture; professional dancing, writing, or making a living as a musician. “Big-c creativity” is the stuff of legends: the discovery of the double helix, or the musical legacies of Mozart and the Beatles. Right now, schools mostly work in the range of mini-c and little-c creativity, although they can be given the tools to lay the groundwork for pro-c and even per- haps big-c creativity.

W hile almost all students enter high school thinking they will go on to post-secondary education, by the time they leave, aspirations are often quite different. Aiman Flahat, the principal of Toronto’s John Polanyi Collegiate Institute, understands that high expectations of students are critical, particularly in inner- city settings. A key means of implicitly communicating high expectations is by exposing students to the kinds of advanced skills that have been identified as being essential for future success—creativity among them.

John Polanyi Collegiate Institute, just northwest of downtown Toronto, first opened its doors in September 2011. Residents in Lawrence Heights, the surrounding neighbourhood, are predominantly first-generation immigrants from East and West African countries, the Caribbean and Latin America.

The community is also deeply affected by youth gangs and violent crime involving firearms. Another local principal expressed frustration about the neighbourhood’s bad reputation overshadowing the strengths of the community. But he acknowledged, “There are one or two major shootings in this area every year, and the impact on the students is enormous.” For Flahat, these circumstances are all the more reason to teach students “how to think and be able to solve big problems while maintaining a vision, being optimistic and not settling for the easy fixes.”

When Flahat became principal in January 2012, John Polanyi was under-subscribed, with only about three hundred students. Flahat was determined to attract students with aspirations of post-secondary studies—the best and the brightest from Lawrence Heights, the adjacent communities and beyond—and to become a centre of excellence in the sciences, mathematics, and robotics.

In one particularly striking commitment to raising expectations for its students, Flahat and his team forged a partnership with one of the world’s most highly regarded business schools, the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Former dean Roger Martin had developed a creative problem-solving methodology he calls “integrative thinking.” Martin had interviewed over fifty business leaders for his best-selling business book, The Opposable Mind: Winning Through Integrative Thinking . He profiled leaders like Michael Lee-Chin, the billionaire investor and philanthropist who grew up the child of store clerks in Jamaica, and Martin’s long-time client CEO Alan Lafley of Procter and Gamble.

The best thinkers, Martin argues, can hold two opposing ideas (or solutions) in their head at the same time, then synthesize to get the best of both. When Lafley started at Procter and Gamble, for example, he faced two competing strains of advice on how to manage the challenge of declining revenues. Some advocated cost-cutting and price wars with competing brands; others advocated investment in research and development. Lafley chose an approach that incorporated both methods, focusing on reorganization with an emphasis on reducing cost, and acquisition of smaller companies that were pioneering innovative products.

As the dean of a business school, Martin was convinced that higher education often trains students in analytical methods that actually work against the kind of creative synthesis he had seen to be a hallmark of successful business people. He sought to develop this skill in his students, teaching the approach to MBAs and commerce students. But he began to think, “Why are we waiting so long? Doing integrative thinking in business school is remedial. Let’s start teaching this before we have to ‘undo the damage’ of more conventional education.” His team decided to see if their program, called I-Think, had legs in the K–12 sector.

His team partnered with a handful of elite private schools, offering the program as an after-school extracurricular. The program spread to other private schools. As it gained buzz, the Toronto District School Board approached Rotman about bringing the program into public schools, especially those where students were facing significant challenges. One of those schools was John Polanyi.

Flahat helped incorporate the I-Think program into a Grade 12 business credit called Creative Problem Solving, and made sure the opportunity was available to all students. Rahim Essabhai, an experienced teacher in the school’s business department, worked with a research associate from Rotman to bring the course to life.

Essabhai is the “ CEO ” of his classroom, and his students work as consultants for the real-world clients with whom he pairs them. For example, he has connected his class with Rouge National Urban Park, in Scarborough, which wanted a team of students to advise them on their challenge of ensuring that urban youth use the park. He also paired them with Wounded Warriors, an organization that provides support to ill and injured veterans, which was interested in broadening its range of participants, and particularly in boosting the participation of women veterans.

Some years, Flahat gives the students a specific challenge that could serve to improve their school. He asked one class to try to use their creative problem-solving skills to build enrolment. They had already gone from three hundred students to seven hundred. What would it take to get to a thousand?

Sakaana Yasotharan was one of the Grade 12 students charged with increasing enrolment. Over the course of five weeks, Sakaana and her classmates used the integrative thinking methodology to wrestle with their problem. They identified two opposing models for boosting enrolment: offering niche appeal through specialized programs and becoming a community hub. Students needed to recognize—and live with—the competing strengths of the two models.

Sakaana’s group was more immediately drawn toward the community model because they saw how it responded to the needs of their neighbourhood. They worried the specialized school model was really about enticing students who weren’t like them. Sakaana remembers her group wondering, “What do kids from well-off families have that low-income students don’t?” and “Why should we want those kids here?”

The students had to condense all of their contemplation and discussion into two words that described the central strengths of each potential solution. Sakaana’s group chose mastery for the specialized school model, and the Swahili word ubuntu for the community hub model. They considered mastery to be a vital skill, and identified excelling at something as a valuable way to gain confidence; despite their initial suspicion of the specialized schools model, the students were eventually able to identify its assets, and what it could offer them. Ubuntu has been translated as, “I am who I am because we are who we are.” John Polanyi, they concluded, would increase its enrolment by supporting the development of both confidence and excellence (mastery) and a thriving, inclusive community (ubuntu).

At the end of the term, the I-Think students presented their work in the sleek, ultra-modern Rotman business school. One of the judges at the Rotman presentation was Roger Martin. He told the students that their presentation was one of the best he had seen, at any level of education.

Flahat was also inspired by his students’ ideas, and took their solutions seriously. Working with his staff, he pulled various strands from the students’ proposal and wove them into the life of the school. Sakaana’s group’s desire to incorporate the values of ubuntu aligned with his own vision for John Polanyi: “Creating a culture that is welcoming, and makes students feel empowered, rather than just getting things done, managing.”

The experience reflected Flahat’s belief that “when students are given an opportunity to make a difference—when they have real problems to solve that are connected and related to community and organizations—it ignites a passion for them to engage in their learning.”

As students became more engaged, they became more committed; and as they became more committed, they became more successful. The spirit of creativity fostered by the program spread throughout the school, and Flahat began to see his students succeeding in new and unexpected ways. They began winning prizes: SickKids’ MedTech Challenge for neurosurgical robotics; the University of Waterloo’s Pascal and Fermat Mathematics Contests; the Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship (sage) Canada National Entrepreneurial Competition, Social Enterprise Business category; and even archery competitions. Literacy scores rose. Math scores rose. And the school continues to break ground in its role as a community hub.

Excerpted from Pushing the Limits by Kelly Gallagher-Mackay and Nancy Steinhauer. Copyright © 2017 Kelly Gallagher-Mackay and Nancy Steinhauer. Published by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Nancy Steinhauer is an educational leader with over twenty years of experience and a recipient of Canada’s Outstanding Principals Award.

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Effects of homework creativity on academic achievement and creativity disposition: Evidence from comparisons with homework time and completion based on two independent Chinese samples

Affiliations.

• 1 College of Educational Science, Bohai University, Jinzhou, China.
• 2 Research Center of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, China.
• 3 Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology, and Foundations, College of Education, Mississippi State University, MS, United States.
• PMID: 36033015
• PMCID: PMC9417817
• DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.923882

During the past several decades, the previous studies have been focusing on the related theoretical issues and measuring tool of homework behaviors (mainly including homework time, completion, and homework creativity). However, the effects of these homework behaviors on general creativity remain unknown. Employing a number of questionnaires, this study investigated two samples from middle schools of Mainland China. The results showed that (1) the eight-item version of Homework Creativity Behaviors Scale had acceptable validity and reliability; (2) compared with homework completion and homework time, homework creativity explained less variety of academic achievement (3.7% for homework creativity; 5.4% for completion and time); (3) homework creativity explained more variance of general creativity than that of homework completion and homework time accounted (7.0% for homework creativity; 1.3% for completion and time); and (4) homework creativity was negatively associated with grade level. Contrary to the popular beliefs, homework completion and homework creativity have positive effects on the students' general creativity. Several issues that need further studies were also discussed.

Keywords: academic achievement; creativity; grade effect; homework; homework behaviors; homework creativity.

Copyright © 2022 Fan, Ma, Xu, Chang and Guo.

Do schools kill creativity?

Do Schools Really Kill Creativity?

Jonathan Sun

BKC affiliate Jonny Sun offers his insights into creativity and authenticity in the digital age, and what schools are doing right—and wrong—when it comes to digital literacy.

“In my experience, students feel seen when we discuss the internet with them in complex ways that respect the fact that they have an incredible amount of experience with the internet—and perhaps, in many cases, more complex experiences than those who teach them,” Sun says.

Read more in EdSurge

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Episode 355

Where does creativity come from (and why do schools kill it off).

Family environments and “diversifying experiences” (including the early death of a parent); intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations; schools that value assessments, but don’t assess the things we value. All these elements factor into the long, mysterious march towards a creative life. To learn more, we examine the early years of Ai Weiwei, Rosanne Cash, Elvis Costello, Maira Kalman, Wynton Marsalis, Jennifer Egan, and others. (Ep. 2 of the “ How to Be Creative ” series.)

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Episode Transcript

Stephen DUBNER: I don’t understand why you’re not in prison in China. It sounds like — obviously they did it for a little while. Ai WEIWEI: I’ll tell the truth. I tried to think about it and suddenly, just this moment, I realized the answer. The jail in China is not large enough to put me in. DUBNER: What do you mean? WEIWEI: I’m just too large for them. My ideas penetrate the walls.

Are your ideas big enough to penetrate walls? His, apparently, are.

WEIWEI: My name is Ai Weiwei . I’m 61 years old. I was born in 1957 in Beijing, China. But in the year I was born, my father was exiled.

In our previous episode, we asked the art economist David Galenson to name a true creative genius.

David GALENSON: I mean, Ai Weiwei is a giant. Ai Weiwei I believe is not only the most important painter in the world, he’s the most important person in art. Ai Weiwei has changed the world. With his art, he has made a contribution to political discourse. This is a unique person in art, almost in the last hundred years.

So we went to Berlin to visit Ai Weiwei. We interviewed him in his subterranean studio, a former brewery in the former East Berlin.

DUBNER: And how do you describe what you do now? WEIWEI: That is a little bit confusing, because as a profession, most things I did relate to so-called art. So people call me artist. But since I have been also working in defending human rights or freedom of speech or human condition, they call me activist. DUBNER: Do you care what people call you? WEIWEI: I don’t really care. I think I’ll live my life. I do care if I still can wake up the next morning. I do care if I can walk to school to pick up my son.

You can see why people are confused by what, exactly, Ai Weiwei is, or does. He spends a lot of time making things but also a lot of time on Twitter, calling out institutional hypocrisies or cruelties. He once created a museum piece comprised of 100 million handmade porcelain sunflower seeds; he also made a series of photographs in which he drops a Han Dynasty urn to the ground and smashes it to bits. Lately, he’s been consumed with the global refugee crisis: he hung 14,000 life vests around Berlin’s main concert hall; he installed a sprawling public-art project in New York called “ Good Fences Make Good Neighbors ”; and he made a documentary film called “ Human Flow .”

WEIWEI:  The officials came here and told them, look, there’s no way you’re going to get papers to continue. Either you go voluntarily, or we arrest you.

Ai Weiwei’s enduring obsession has been to stick his finger in the eye of the Chinese government. He helped design the Olympic stadium for Beijing’s 2008 Games; but by the time it was built, he’d attacked the organizers for cronyism and corruption. After the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan that killed tens of thousands, he launched a citizens’ investigation into the poorly-built schools where so many children died; he gathered up the mangled rebar from quake sites and turned it into a sculpture called Straight . When the government placed him under surveillance, he responded by making a sculpture called Surveillance Camera. In 2011, Ai Weiwei was kidnapped and jailed by the Chinese government. Upon being set free, he decided it was best to leave China.

WEIWEI: Since I was born, I would be seen as a son of the enemy of the people. They see you are dangerous. They see you are someone who could have a potential to make big trouble. DUBNER: They were right. WEIWEI: They’re perfectly right. But I try to live up to that kind of conditions, too. I am not satisfied with what I did.

Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing , was a prominent poet and intellectual. Before the Communist revolution, he was considered a leftist subversive. When Mao took over, Qing started out in the new regime’s good graces but eventually fell out of favor, and the family was exiled from Beijing.

WEIWEI: So I grew up in the Xinjiang province, which is Gobi Desert. And spent about 18 years in that location. DUBNER: So when you were a kid, you’re growing up in — we call them labor camps or reeducation camps. I don’t know what you call it? WEIWEI: We call it reeducation camps to remake you, to become a better part of a society. DUBNER: It didn’t seem to have worked. WEIWEI: It did work on me. DUBNER: Well, if the state was trying to reeducate you — WEIWEI: But that reeducation is very important, because it builds your reactionary to this kind brainwashing or trying to limit individual’s rights and freedom of speech. So you get, somehow, immune to these attacks.

For several years, the family lived underground, in a cavern. For two decades, Ai Ching did not write.

WEIWEI: My father is so scared. There is no single day he comes home not physically shaking because he’s been so mistreated and — DUBNER: He tried to kill himself several times. WEIWEI: He did. He attempted three times. DUBNER: How did he try? Do you know? WEIWEI: He once, the electric — how do you call that? DUBNER: Socket. WEIWEI: Socket. Of course, the whole light went off because of the shortage. And he once tried hanging himself, and it’s so lucky the nail was loosened. DUBNER: And you were a teenager then or younger? WEIWEI: I was about eight or nine. DUBNER: And did you know what happened? WEIWEI: I didn’t know at all. He told me. DUBNER: Later. WEIWEI: Yeah.

Concerning Ai Weiwei’s upbringing, at least two questions come to mind, both of them probably unanswerable. The first: what are the odds that that boy, living in a labor camp in the Gobi Desert, would become one of the most influential artists in the world? And: how much did that environment have to do with who he became?

*      *      *

Ai Weiwei’s childhood was of course atypical. And a lot of his art is clearly a response to his family’s treatment during China’s Cultural Revolution. But is there any way to say that his upbringing was a cause of his creativity?

Dean SIMONTON: Yeah, that’s very important. We actually have a term for it. We call it “diversifying experiences.”

Dean Simonton is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California-Davis. He’s spent decades studying the biographies of great artists and scientists to help understand where creativity comes from.

SIMONTON: What “diversifying experiences” means is you’re exposed to one or more events, in childhood or adolescence, that puts you on a different track from everybody else. So instead of being raised just like all the other kids on your block in a very conventional fashion, you all of a sudden find yourself different. You see yourself as different. You have different goals. And these diversifying experiences can take a lot of different forms, and often you look at the lives of a lot of creative geniuses and you see more than one of them operating. DUBNER: So you’re saying that diversifying influences would tend to lead to higher creativity then, yes? SIMONTON: Tend to lead to creative genius. Pat BROWN: I didn’t realize that he was a spy until I was a teenager.

That’s the scientist Pat Brown . He grew up all over the world — in Paris, Taipei, in Washington, D.C.

BROWN: The way I figured it out was that a good friend of mine, my dad was his boss in a way, and he made some mention of the fact that his dad worked for the C.I.A., and I thought, “Well, that’s weird because —” DUBNER: “My dad doesn’t.” BROWN: Yeah.

For a time, Brown was best known as an inventor of a method of genetic analysis called the D.N.A. microarray , which has become useful for the study of cancer.

DUBNER: Was this research primarily within the context of solving cancer, addressing cancer, or no? BROWN: No. Let’s put it this way. It’s kind of hard to, for so many of these things that I would do, any scientist would do, it’s not necessarily that there’s a single reason why you’re doing it. You just realize that, if we could do this, there’s all these cool things that you could apply it to. Okay. And in fact, in the early days when we had first got this thing working, we had a few good ideas there was reason enough to do it. And then as you’re actually doing experiments you realize, “Oh we could do this. Oh we could do this.”

Until a few years ago, Brown was a sort of high-end researcher-without-portfolio at Stanford. And then he took a massive left turn and founded a startup with rather modest goals.

BROWN: I’m currently the C.E.O. and founder of Impossible Foods, which is a company whose mission is to completely replace animals as a food production technology by 2035.

I asked Brown whether he saw any connection between his globe-trotting childhood with a C.I.A. dad and his scientific career.

BROWN: I think the fact that I traveled and lived in multiple places in the world. And in those days kids were a lot more like free-range at a young age. And I felt like I had a lot of freedom to explore all these places and so forth, I think had an impact on me in the sense that it just it just made me aware of the fact that there is basically no place on earth that’s inaccessible. Maira KALMAN: Probably the base of everything that I do is a fantastic curiosity about people, intense empathy that we’re all struggling, we’re all heroic to just even wake up in the morning.

That’s Maira Kalman .

Maira KALMAN: I am an illustrator and author.

And she’s got a son.

Alex KALMAN: My name is Alex Kalman and I’m a designer, a curator, a creative director, a writer, an editor, and someone with generally many ants in their pants. DUBNER: Can one or both of you — you can take turns, you can interrupt, whatever you want — just describe briefly the family. That’s a small topic, but just a little bit about the family growing up and until now. Maira KALMAN: Did you say that’s a small topic? DUBNER: Yeah. Maira KALMAN: Oh my God. That’s an epic. I think that’s the epic topic. There is no bigger topic than the family.

Maira Kalman is best known for her children’s books and her illustrated edition of The Elements of Style and her work for The New Yorker , including one of its most famous covers ever, called “ New Yorkistan .” Her work manages to be whimsical and melancholy at once. Paintings of cake and dogs and demure old ladies in plume-y hats. She once bought a pair of the conductor Arturo Toscanini’s pants at auction, just to have them. Actually, she bought the whole suit …

Maira KALMAN: But his pants have a lot more panache when you say his pants.

For years, Maira Kalman was best-known as the right-hand woman to her husband Tibor Kalman , a wildly creative and influential designer. He died young, nearly 20 years ago, when their two children were young. I’ve known them since around that time.

DUBNER: Pretend I don’t know either of you at all. Maira KALMAN: Okay. DUBNER: And we’re sitting next to each other on an airplane or something and I say, “Who are you?” Oh, you guys are a mother and son, tell me a little bit about yourselves. What kind of family was this? Where did you live and what was that household like? Alex KALMAN: I think we’d say, “Do you mind if we swap seats so that we don’t have to sit next to each other on our flight.” Yeah. We’d prefer not to talk, actually. Maira KALMAN: I’m going to say, I’m going to be in business class and he’s going to be in — no, anyway, so go on. Alex KALMAN: Mom!

Alex and Maira are collaborators too. They created an installation called Sara Berman’s Closet — Sara Berman being Maira’s mother and Alex’s grandmother — and the installation consisted of the contents of Sara’s closet, artfully curated and arranged. It’s appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. So I was curious what the Kalman house was like to grow up in.

Alex KALMAN: It was a really joyful and wild and fun childhood. We were all very close and we went on many adventures. And days were filled with looking around and making books when we were bored and cooking dinner and listening to music from all corners of the earth and just a real — really deep exposure to everything and anything that was not familiar in our day to day. Maira KALMAN: And I thought that a house where we’re making books and dancing and making costumes and turning the furniture upside down is — How could you not do that? So the creativity in the home, in the family, was a sense of play and a sense of loving language and art and music. Alex KALMAN: I think that real creativity isn’t this thought to say, “Okay now let’s be creative.” It’s just a natural feeling or understanding of saying, “All these rules are opportunity to create new rules or bend certain rules.” And the joy in that type of experimentation and that type of play, hopefully with some result that is meaningful or profound or funny or entertaining. Nico MUHLY: My parents to their enormous credit were really not that pushy.

That’s the composer Nico Muhly , the youngest person to ever have a commission from the Metropolitan Opera, in New York. He grew up in New England with a painter mom and a documentary-filmmaker dad.

MUHLY: And it’s the usual, you have to be driven to the thing and then you have to get all the books and you have to pay for these classes and whatever. So my parents were really great about that, but it wasn’t this version of the thing where it’s as if we were going to press you so hard to become a concert violinist. Nor was it, isn’t this a cute hobby but you need to work for Goldman Sachs. I think they found the good middle point. It’s less about them being artists and more about them creating a household in which ideas were spoken about. And I think that’s the real luxury of my childhood was not necessarily being surrounded by art in that way, but by people who read and thought about a million things and channeled that into, not just artistic expression. I mean, we all know, we all have horror stories of people raised by artists.

Horror stories, maybe. But also success stories. Growing up in a creative household means learning not only that a creative life is possible; but if you pay attention, you can learn how to do it. That was the case with Elvis Costello , the singular singer-songwriter, whose father was a singer with a popular dance band.

Elvis COSTELLO: Nobody would regard them as hip in the slightest way but the leader, Joe Loss, he managed to front a band from the late 20’s to the 80’s. He was a remarkable character in English light entertainment. They weren’t by any means up with the rock and roll vibe or anything like that.

Young Elvis — actually his name was Declan MacManus back then — young Declan would hang out in the darkened balcony of the Hammersmith Palais in London during the band’s Saturday afternoon set. Watching his father emerge into the limelight, in jacket and tie. Which is why to this day, Elvis Costello pretty much always wears a jacket and tie.

COSTELLO: You have a sort of admiration for your parents’ ability to do whatever it is they do. That was one perspective of performance. And he brought music into the house that he was learning for the weekly broadcast. Later on, after my parents separated, his life transformed. He then sort of took on an appearance closer to sort of Peter Sellers in What’s New Pussycat? He grew his hair long and he started to wear fashionable clothes and listen to contemporary music, because he left the safety of the nightly gig with the dance band and decided he wanted to do his own thing. So that striking out and being independent thing was sort of from his example, no matter what the music was or the style — and bear in mind my taste in music changed just like any teenager; it was all about one thing, the next day it was all about another; it was always about the song. I had spent the last two years of schooling in Liverpool which at that time was musically very quiet in the early 70’s, and tried to make my own way playing my own songs. I had a partner, we sang in bars and any evening where they would let us on the stage, really. We were making tiny little bits of money, just about covered our expenses, and I learned a little bit how to do it, but I never really thought that I was — I looked at the television every Thursday to see Top of the Pops and saw the distance between the way I looked and felt and sounded and what was a pop singer right then, which was a lot of people in baker foil with eye makeup on; that was the music of that moment, the glitter, glam moment. That seemed very distant from a 17-year-old. DUBNER: Did you wish you could do that? COSTELLO: No, I never wanted to do that. I might be the only person in English pop music that made a record that never wanted to be David Bowie , while still loving everything he did. Wynton MARSALIS: My father really struggled a lot. He couldn’t make money playing modern jazz.

Wynton Marsalis is one of the most celebrated musicians alive — a jazz and classical trumpeter who also composes, teaches, and runs the landmark Jazz at Lincoln Center program. His father, Ellis Marsalis , is also an accomplished jazz musician: a piano player.

MARSALIS: He played with great musicians, but the people didn’t really want to hear the style of music they were playing.

In the 1960’s and 70’s, when Wynton was growing up in New Orleans, the dominant popular music was funk and R&B; not the modern jazz his father played.

MARSALIS: I’d grown up around the music, so my father and them played, they listen to their music, no one else was listening to it, but I heard it.

So Ellis Marsalis supported the family by teaching.

MARSALIS: Well my daddy, the first jobs my father had paid $5,000 a year, $6,000. He was a band director for segregated high schools and in towns like Opelousas, Louisiana. Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.

But Ellis was still an influential musician in New Orleans — and for his son.

MARSALIS: Musicians knew what he was. People in the neighborhood respected him for his opinions. Yeah you can’t say nothing to jazz musicians; t hey know stuff. The barbershop or something. And also because in the barbershop, at the height of black nationalism, my father was always the one who was not nationalistic and that was a great embarrassment for me. I’d be saying, “Man, why are you always talking to stuff that’s against what everybody is saying?” And he would always be very philosophical: “Man, you don’t attack people that’s not there. You gotta tell the people in front of you what they don’t want to hear.” And he was always, a big one, he used to say, “All of everybody never does anything.” If you said, “they,” he would always say, “Who is they, man? Can you tell me who they is? Do you know them? Who are their names?”

Wynton’s mother was also a big influence.

MARSALIS: My mama was unique, and she had an originality. Her food tasted different, she had her own way of doing stuff. She was a big creative person. DUBNER: The way she decorated your house, I understand was artistic? Yeah. MARSALIS: Everything about her, everything. She grew up, she’s from the projects. So, she’s very unusual, because she very much had the street element which has become a cliché now. Then it wasn’t as cliché. And she was also it was her first to graduate from college, she went to Grambling University. She was extremely intelligent in terms of just her ability to do, she could do my chemistry homework when I was in high school and any spatial problem she understood. But she also had a very deep social consciousness that was not, it was not cliché.

And Wynton Marsalis distinguished himself at a very young age.

MARSALIS: Well, I played the Haydn Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic when I was 14. And the Brandenburg Concerto with the New Orleans Youth Orchestra when I was 16. DUBNER: How did you recognize that trumpet was going to be what you were good at? MARSALIS: Well, I didn’t know till I was 12 that I was going to be interested in it and then it was just a matter of applying, practicing and stuff. I noticed, if you practice you got better. Because a guy in my neighborhood was always picked on. And he saw Bruce Lee , Enter the Dragon, and he decided to get some nunchucks. And man he would swing these sticks and then all of a sudden, maybe five months of him swinging these sticks every day, he became a virtuoso at it. Then there was no more picking on him, calling him fat, taking his money, stuff that people liked to do him. All of a sudden it was, hey, say Fats, come swing them sticks for us. And then Fats, his name was Theodore. We called him Thedo. We grew up, we were in the country, Kenner, Louisiana the black side, segregated side. And I noticed one day, he had an encounter with a guy name we called Big Pull, and after that encounter he definitely was not picked on. And I thought, “Man, practicing is something.” This guy, six months ago, everybody was picking on him, now he practiced swinging these sticks and his whole position in the hierarchy of this food chain has changed. I understood from watching him that just the diligence and repetition, intelligent repetition you could become better at things.

A couple of years later, Wynton and his brother Branford joined a funk band.

MARSALIS: I was good at making a bass line. I’m left-handed so they would always say, “Put a bass line on this bro,” so I’d put a bass line or something. We rehearsed in the 9th Ward, we had a band called The Creators at that time. In New Orleans, my brother and I were the two youngest musicians on the whole funk scene. I was 13 and Branford was 14. Our band was mainly older men, maybe in their early 20s and teens, late teens. There were maybe 10 to 13 bands they all had names like Cool Enterprise, Flashback, Stop Inc., Vietnam, Blackmail, the Family Players. We would have battles of the bands, we’d play dances. We’d play gigs everywhere, wedding receptions. We did a series of talent shows that the police department would sponsor to make community relations, and people would come up out of the audience, we played the worst areas of New Orleans, and it was the most fun we ever had. And they would come up and sing or play. And we had to learn their 15 or 20 songs and we learned that, we never look at music of course, most of the times there was never music. We just learned the music and we played and it was great. I actually didn’t want to join the band, because at that time, when I was 12, I wanted to play jazz. And my daddy is the one that said, “Man, play in the band.” DUBNER: Oh really? MARSALIS: Yeah he said, “Man, join the band.” DUBNER: Because why? MARSALIS: Because you have to have experiences to know what something is. Don’t cut yourself out of experiences when you’re young. He was always saying, don’t adopt my prejudices; develop your own. Mark DUPLASS: Jay and I were just this little two-person team.

That’s the filmmaker and actor Mark Duplass , one half of another New Orleans brotherhood.

DUPLASS: We would sleep in Jay’s single bed together for way too late. Jay had already gone through puberty. I mean it was weird. But I think we started to develop this sense of we might try to become artists. And that seems like an impossible thing to do and be financially sustainable. So we better link arms and souls.

Mark and Jay Duplass both write, act, and direct, sometimes together, sometimes not. They had a pretty standard-issue suburban upbringing.

DUPLASS: Mom’s home with us while Dad’s cranking away 50 to 55 hours a week, building the American dream. So we can one day take a vacation that’s not in the car, one day fly to a vacation. That was the goal. So what that meant practically for me and Jay is that we didn’t have a lot of stuff. Our parents gave us a lot of emotional support and a lot of love, but they didn’t buy us a lot of stuff, so we were very bored. And I think when cable arrived which was a marker of success. My dad was like, “We’re getting cable and we are doing it.” That’s when H.B.O. came into our lives and that really lit us up as a storytellers, because for those of you who don’t remember in the early-to-mid 80’s, there was no curation as to when certain kinds of movies were shown. They generally leave the R-rated movies for the nighttime now but back then we would come home from school and it was Ordinary People and Sophie’s Choice and we were just enjoying the hard-hitting dramas of the late 70’s and early 80’s. And I think it really shaped a lot of who we were. DUBNER: I’m curious, so you guys are what? You’re maybe 10 and Jay’s 14 or something at this point? DUPLASS: Yeah, right around that age, yeah. DUBNER: Yeah. So you’re watching Ordinary People and Sophie’s Choice , which are not exactly teen or tween fare. Were you aware that you were outliers in that regard? DUPLASS: It was still very subconscious, because we would take our bikes to the streets and still play with the other kids and play football. They really wanted to talk about Star Wars . And we were fine, and we watched those movies to keep up. But it was this feeling, which I think a lot of people have maybe later in high school when you start to realize, “Oh, this is not my tribe. I know how to play this game. I know how to talk about the things to get along, but when I go home, I’ve got my one or two people that are really are my tribe. And we’re talking about that stuff.” That sort of dynamic happened to me and Jay much earlier than most people talk about it happening.

The Duplass brothers pretty much built their mental model of a creative life from scratch. For Rosanne Cash , the opposite was true. She’s the daughter of country-music legend Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian. As for Rosanne following in his footsteps:

Rosanne CASH: My mother was afraid of the life it would lead to. So she didn’t encourage me that much. My mother was very creative in other ways. She crocheted, and she painted, and she was president of her garden club and she was creative in some domestic realms. But writing and music just carried a lingering fog of fear around it for her. But I remember my dad was on the road and I remember secretly writing him when I was 12 and saying everything I wanted to do with my life, that I wanted to be a writer that I wanted to do something important, that I wanted people to read my words, that I loved language, that music was so important to me and had changed my life. I told him all of these things and he wrote me back and he said “I see that you see as I see.” It was powerful even to a 12-year-old. It gave me encouragement.

Her parents got divorced around this time; her father had become a heavy drinker and a drug addict. This made her rethink putting music at the center of her life.

CASH: Well, that was complicated for me because my dad was a very famous musician and I grew up thinking that fame was a terrible thing that happened to you, like a disease. And I thought, why would I go into that? Why would I try to attract that kind of attention? And you never have any privacy and privacy is so important to me because a writer needs privacy and I don’t want to go on the road and I don’t want to take drugs and get divorced. Well, actually I did want to take drugs in the beginning so that was — But most of that imprint came from my mom because she was really afraid of fame because of what happened in her life with my dad.

For Rosanne Cash, it was a cautionary tale but, in the end, not enough to stop her.

CASH: Yeah, I started writing songs and then I wanted to sing them myself and then I made demos and then I showed them to a record label. There was no turning back.

Rosanne Cash went on to put out many records, mostly country and pop, some of them big hits; she’s also written four books. She’s about to release a new record, called She Remembers Everything . A childhood like hers — a musician father, always traveling; drugs and alcohol; fame and its attendant burdens; her parents’ divorce: it’s practically the model for what we think of as a dysfunctional family. And having a dysfunctional family is often seen as the model for living a creative life.

Teresa AMABILE: It’s false.

That’s Teresa Amabile , a social psychologist from Harvard who studies creativity.

AMABILE: Many creative people do have dysfunctional families but not every creative person has a dysfunctional family. There’s some interesting research on this by David Feldman and Robert Elbert and a number of other people who have looked at the biographical backgrounds of people who have distinguished themselves for their creativity. Very often they faced a lot of adversity in childhood. Maybe they had a serious illness themselves. Maybe a parent was seriously ill or died. Maybe there was an ugly, acrimonious divorce or they lost a sibling. Those kinds of events can crush a child, they can they can lead to a lot of problems; they can lead to substance abuse, they can lead to various forms of emotional illness. They can also lead to incredible resilience and almost superhuman behaviors, seemingly, if people can come through those experiences intact. I don’t know if we — we being the field in general — have discovered what the keys are, what makes the difference for kids.

It is true, however, that eminent people in a range of fields are much more likely than the average person to have lost a parent at a young age. In the U.S., the rate of parental death before age 16 is 8 percent. For high-performing scientists, the rate is 26 percent; for U.S. presidents, 34 percent; for poets, 55 percent. But, we should note, the rate of parental death is also disproportionately high for … prisoners. So it may be that a parent’s death is a shock to any child’s system, but that it’s hard to predict the direction of that shock. Too much depends on the circumstances, like how talented the kid is or whether they have some key guidance.

AMABILE: Sometimes it’s one key adult who can somehow rescue them in their lives. Sometimes it seems to just be a trait of the kid. Something within themselves.

There’s also the notion that creativity itself can be a kind of coping mechanism — as it was for the graphic designer Michael Bierut .

Michael BIERUT: I was a really good elementary school and junior high school and high school artist. I was very accomplished, I could do very realistic drawings that impressed people. And boy, did I take pleasure in impressing people. Most of my other physical attributes and mannerisms were the things that would provoke many strangers just to beat me up. But this magic ability to draw things actually seemed to be a thing that even bullies would be impressed by. Early on, I started associating creativity not with just something that I would do in a lonely room for my own satisfaction but something that somehow would give me a way of operating in the larger world. If you were designing a poster for the school play, you got to go to rehearsals. So even if you couldn’t sing or dance or act, you got to make a contribution to the overall effort that went into bringing that play to the stage. SIMONTON: Well, that’s another example of a diversifying experience. Being in an out group.

Dean Simonton again.

SIMONTON: Being a minority, as long as you’re not oppressed. I mean, this is the problem. A lot of minorities are oppressed, and so they’re not going to realize their potential, even though they are more inclined to think outside the box. If they can’t get a job, then it’s not going to help them much. I mean, a good example of that is that Jews in Europe are well-known to be overrepresented in a lot of domains of creativity, particularly in the sciences. For example, Nobel prizes in the sciences, Jews are overrepresented. DUBNER: It’s something like 20 percent. SIMONTON: But, guess what? That’s most likely to be in the case where Jews were emancipated, where they were no longer subject to the kind of anti-Semitism that they saw in medieval Europe. In Switzerland and a number of other countries. So Switzerland, that disproportion is much much higher than you see in Russia, which actually has many more Jews, but had a much longer history of anti-Semitism. Maira KALMAN: I used to use the Nazis invading my studio as a motivator to finish an assignment that I was dragging. And I would say, “Well, if the Nazis came in two hours, would it be done? What if they came in one hour — would it be done then?” And that was expecting the worst. And I was brought up, of course my family — especially from my father that sense of you never know what’s going to happen. Horrible things will happen.

Kalman grew up in Israel, her parents having escaped Belarus before the Holocaust. But the rest of her father’s family did not make it out.

Maira KALMAN: In our family, all roads lead to the Holocaust. It’s kind of an inescapable part of a section of our lives and it’s a reference point for so many things. When we talk about politics or things being bad and we say, “Well, it’s not the Holocaust so get a grip.”

When I visited Kalman recently in her Greenwich Village apartment, one room was dominated by cardboard boxes, recently freed from storage. They contained the possessions of her late husband. She and her son Alex are planning to make a documentary about Tibor Kalman.

DUBNER: Would it be fun to open a Tibor box and just see what’s in one? Maira KALMAN: No. I mean, it could be. Oh wait, I take that back. Let’s open this box. DUBNER: Okay. Maira KALMAN: This box is — no, not that box. This box — Yes. Okay. This is — he used to take this extendable fork to a restaurant. And he’d opened the extendable fork and then all of a sudden — this is — well this needs to be repaired but he would reach over to another plate from the customers next to us and take the food off their plate. DUBNER: Oh, not at your own table? Maira KALMAN: No, not at our own table. What would have been the fun of that? The fun of this was that he would reach over into somebody else’s table and take their food. He did it in Italy, and everything is much more jolly and festive there and everybody’s laughing a lot at this guy who’s reaching over. And these are Karl Marx communist potato chips which I made for the Tiborocity show. We created a mock store, and this is after he died of course, and I thought, shouldn’t we have Karl Marx communist potato chips, as if that was part of our collection.

Maira and Tibor Kalman’s son Alex is now 33 years old. It’s pretty obvious that a lot of his creative spirit comes from his mother and his father. His main project at the moment is a small museum called Mmuseumm , he calls it “a contemporary natural history museum” and a form of “object journalism.” This is where “Sara Berman’s Closet” originated, before it landed at the Met. We visited Mmuseumm with Alex Kalman one afternoon. Mmuseumm is very, very small. How small? It’s housed in an old freight elevator. About three people can fit comfortably. And yet: it is a museum.

DUBNER: This is nicely done. Alex KALMAN: Museum quality. DUBNER: It is museum quality. Alex KALMAN: It is. DUBNER: Seriously. Alex KALMAN: Yeah. Well the idea is that it’s a museum. There’s certain rules we felt we had to follow. DUBNER: Yeah. Alex KALMAN: And if we did that then, there’s other rules we could play with. So this collection is called “Modern Religion,” and it’s basically exploring how these ancient traditions stay relevant in today’s society and one way of staying relevant is redesigning the elements or the tools of that religion to fit in with modern trends. So today, everybody’s gluten-free. So now there’s gluten-free communion wafers. Or everybody’s on-the-go, so there’s on-the-go Communion kits. It’s looking at these seemingly banal objects, and — DUBNER: And this one here is the — Alex KALMAN: Yeah. DUBNER: Really? It looks like a piece of Nicorette, and is that wine and a little host, then? Alex KALMAN: That’s right, yeah. The idea in Mmuseumm is that we want to touch on many different notes of what it means to be human. So there’s things in here that are totally devastating and there’s things in here that are completely absurd and we don’t want the trick to be on you. We want you to be a part of it.

I asked Kalman how his father, and his father’s death, influenced him as a human and as a creative.

Alex KALMAN: There always felt to be a really deep and natural and profound connection between Maira and Tibor and Lulu and me.

Lulu is Alex’s sister.

KALMAN: So there is just a sensibility and a way of feeling and interacting and thinking and doing and why we’re doing and what we’re doing that feels very just binding and natural. And I often think that, subconsciously, the work that I do today feels like a way of maintaining a dialogue with Tibor and he feels very present and very active in it all.

Dean Simonton, you will recall, is a psychology professor who’s studied the biographies of creative geniuses.

Dean SIMONTON: To get back to just pure psychology, there’s something called the “Big 5” personality factors.

The “Big 5” are: conscientiousness, extraversion-slash-introversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and …

SIMONTON: And one of those “Big 5” factors is the openness to experience factor. And it has a lot of different facets to it. It is openness to values, openness to actions, you’re willing to try out different foods, try out different music, all sorts of different things. And this factor is so powerful as a predictor of human behavior, that you can actually tell by going to someone’s dorm room in college whether or not they’re high or low in openness to experience. Okay? Well it turns out this correlates very, very highly with creative genius. Creative geniuses tend to be very, very high in openness to experience. They’re willing to explore different values, different approaches.

We did find a lot of openness to experience in the creatives we’ve been speaking with, often starting in childhood.

Margaret GELLER: I was very much interested in the arts as a child.

That’s Margaret Geller , a path-breaking astrophysicist.

GELLER: And my mother, who was a walking dictionary and loved literature, used to take me to the beautiful Morristown, New Jersey library. It was in a very old building, and one of the things that we read together were plays by all the famous American playwrights. And from that, I really inherited a love of the language and I became fascinated by the theater and by the human condition. So I demanded that I go to acting school. I don’t think my father was that fond of this idea, but it was impossible not to do it.

Geller’s father was a chemist at Bell Labs, the famous tech incubator.

GELLER: I think he started taking me there when I was around 10 and he used to have a mechanical calculator, probably nobody listening, or virtually nobody, knows what one of those are. But they were called Monroe calculators, and the fascinating thing was all the noise they made. And the best thing was to, say, divide one by three, so it would just go, “ca-chunk, ca-chunk, ca-chunk,” and just put out all the threes it could. I learned how to load an X-ray camera, and I learned how to measure an X-ray diffraction photograph, how to use a Vernier. And people would come in and chat with me. And also Bell Labs had, in its lobby, a Foucault pendulum which I used to be fascinated by, many stories high. So that was a fascinating thing to see.

The inventor James Dyson , he of the multi-billion-dollar vacuum fortune, was not predestined for a life of engineering.

James DYSON: My father was head of the classics department at my school till he died. My brother was a classics scholar. And my mother was an English scholar. So there was no engineering, or manufacturing, architecture, or anything in sight.

So how’d that happen?

DYSON: So all I knew about creativity, or the only creative thing I did in school, was art. I went off to art school or arts university to pursue art as a career, as a painter, in fact. But when I got there — and this is in London — I discovered that you could do quite a large number of forms of design, like furniture design, interior design, architecture, ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, filmmaking, and so on. And I became interested in design but ended up doing architecture. And while I was doing architecture I discovered that I was very interested in structural engineering. I don’t know why. Except that at that time, it was the time of Buckminster Fuller and his triadic structures, geodesic structures, and Frei Otto with cable-tensioned structures. And it was a time that concrete and, for that matter bricks, were disappearing as the structure for buildings and being replaced by steel structures of one sort or another. And I realized that architecture was going to be about the structure and the engineering, and not so much the form. And I found engineering fascinating, I don’t know why. I’d never come across it in my life before. DUBNER: I’m curious if you were at all intimidated by the notion of architecture and engineering as much as it appealed to you, did it strike you as something that lay outside the realm of possibility for a boy who came from a family where the classics were the foundation? Did it seem at first just too hard? DYSON: Not at all. You have to remember — or maybe it’s my arrogance, but you have to remember this was the mid-60s in London, where anything was possible. And it didn’t occur to me that I couldn’t be an architect or a structural engineer or anything for that matter.

It’s probably no coincidence that moving to a big city like London changed the way James Dyson thought about his creative prospects. The same thing happened to Ai Weiwei years ago when he lived in New York City for several years.

WEIWEI: Yes, basically the whole universe is so quiet. Not everywhere is like New York City.

The world has gotten more urban over the past few decades. And that’s probably a good thing for the sake of creativity and innovation. Economists like Harvard’s Ed Glaeser argue that cities play an outsized role in economic growth.

Ed GLAESER: I think the city is our greatest invention because it plays to something that is so fundamental in humanity. It plays to our ability to learn from one another.

Our ability to learn from one another in cities. Ideas colliding, on purpose and by accident. Also, there’s competition in cities — and with that competition comes strong incentives to create. But this raises its own, larger question: is creativity best-served by external incentives and motivation, or internal? When Wynton Marsalis was first thinking about pursuing a career in music, his father warned him: he said don’t do it unless you truly love it. “Don’t sit around waiting for publicity, money, people saying you’re great,” he told him, because “that might never happen.” Things obviously worked out well for Wynton Marsalis, but he remembers his father’s message well, and passes it along to his own students in the jazz program at Juilliard, where he teaches.

MARSALIS: My first thing I have my students do is write a mission statement. And that mission statement has three sentences. What do I want to do, how do I achieve it, and why am I doing it? And based on that mission statement, I teach them. And I have, my fundamental teaching to them is, I want you to rise above the cycle of punishment and reward. I’m not going to reward you or punish you. This is information, and you can do what you want with this information. So, you’re always actualizing. And I always tell them, if you want to learn something I can’t stop you. If you don’t want to learn it, I cannot teach you.

What Ellis Marsalis taught Wynton, and what Wynton teaches his students, is supported by the academic research on creativity and children. A few decades ago, the Stanford psychologist Mark Lepper ran an experiment with nursery-school students in which he first watched them doing various activities, one of which was drawing with markers. Teresa Amabile, who studied under Lepper when she was getting her Ph.D., tells the story.

AMABILE: He then took all of the children, if they’d shown any real interest in these markers, he put them into his experiment. And had them go into a separate room and they were randomly assigned to one of a couple of conditions. The experimental condition was one where the children sat down, and the experimenter said, “Hi, I’ve got some Magic Markers and some paper here for you. I wonder, would you be willing to make a drawing for me with these materials in order to get this “good player award?” And the experimenter then held up this little award certificate with a big shiny gold star on it and a place to write in the child’s name. That was the expected-reward condition.

The kids in this group, as promised, got the certificate for making a drawing. A second group of kids were invited to make a drawing — with no mention of a reward — and got the certificate as a surprise afterwards. This was called the “unexpected-reward condition.” And a third group of kids, a control group, made drawings but were neither promised a reward nor surprised with one.

AMABILE: The results were amazing. They were very strong. The kids who were in the control condition, who were in the unexpected-reward condition, were just as interested in playing with those markers and drawing pictures in their free play time as they had been before they went into the experimental room. The kids who were in the promised-reward condition, the contracted-for-reward condition, were significantly less interested in playing with those markers. So this showed very clearly — and there were many subsequent experiments showing — that intrinsic motivation, intrinsic interest in children and in adults, can be undermined by the expectation of reward.

This finding — that extrinsic motivation can erode someone’s intrinsic desire to create — came as a surprise.

AMABILE: It was revolutionary at the time, which was the early 1970s, because behaviorism still held sway in much of psychology, the notion that rewards are purely good, that they motivate behavior, that you can shape behavior with reward and that is true. In fact it’s still true that rewards can be very powerful shapers of behavior. But Mark discovered this very counter-intuitive, unexpected, unintended negative consequence of reward.

Amabile herself, in a follow-up experiment, explored how extrinsic motivation affects the quality of creative work. She gave kids a bunch of art supplies and asked them each to make a collage.

AMABILE: Without a really strict time limit, although we generally guide people to finish the collage in 15 to 20 minutes.

The kids were divided into two groups. The first group was not promised any sort of reward; the second was told that the best collages would win an Etch-a-Sketch or a Magic 8 Ball. This was called the “competitive-reward condition.” Now all Amabile needed were some judges.

AMABILE: I brought in people from the art department at Stanford individually and asked them to rate each collage relative to the others on creativity on a nine-point scale, something like that. And when I analyzed the data, I found that the kids in the competitive-reward condition, made collages that were significantly less creative than the ones made by the kids in the other condition.

Based on this research and more, it would seem that the promise of extrinsic rewards — the kind of incentives that economists think encourage productivity — that actually discourages creativity, and decreases the quality. At least for kids, in these settings — it’s impossible to generalize. But the evidence is strong enough for Amabile to draw some conclusions.

AMABILE: I think that the biggest mistake we make in our schools, and I’m talking about everything from kindergarten now up through college, is to focus kids too much on how the work is going to be evaluated. Part of that is the extreme focus on testing in the United States right now and the past several years. Part of it is the way curricula have been structured, even before the current major push on testing. There’s too much focus on “what is the right answer, what are people going to think of what I’m about to say?” and too little focus on “what am I learning, what cool stuff do I know now that I didn’t know last week or a year ago, what cool things can I do now that I couldn’t do before?” And I think that if we could if we could switch that focus, we would do a lot to open up kids’ creativity. Kids come intrinsically motivated to learn, and we stamp that out of them through the educational system. I don’t think it’s impossible to reorient the way we teach. It’s not going to be easy. But I think we can do it. I think we have to do it. Walter ISAACSON: I think we all see kids who are slightly rebellious, who talk back, who question the teacher.

That’s Walter Isaacson , who’s written biographies of Steve Jobs , Leonardo da Vinci , Benjamin Franklin , and Albert Einstein .

ISAACSON: And at a certain point, the teacher either spends more time and lets the imagination wander or punishes them and says, “Quit questioning me.” Einstein ran away from his school in Germany because he was expected to learn by rote, and he was swatted down every time he tried to question the teacher. So he was lucky — he gets to run away and go to Switzerland, where they have a new type of school system that nurtures questioning authority.

One institution that has raised the questioning of authority to an art form is the M.I.T. Media Lab. It has research units called Opera of the Future and Biomechatronics — and Lifelong Kindergarten . That last one is run by a professor of learning research.

Mitch RESNICK: My name is Mitch Resnick .

Resnick argues that randomized, controlled experimentation — the gold standard of a lot of science — just doesn’t work very well for a subject like creativity.

RESNICK: One problem is it changes one variable at a time. And I don’t think any one variable is going to be the key to creativity. I think that what we see is the most creative environments have lots of different things that work together in an integrated way. So it’s really not so easy to take the classic approach of make a tweak in one variable and see the changes. I don’t think it’s going to be the way that we’re going to get a deeper understanding of the creative process.

Resnick argues that the lack of clear, quantifiable outcomes is a big reason why schools don’t prioritize creativity.

RESNICK: Schools end up focusing on the things that are most easily assessed, rather than focusing on the things that are most valuable for kids and valuable for thriving in today’s society. So what we need to do is to focus more on trying to assess the things we value rather than valuing the things that are most easily assessed.

Resnick and the Lifelong Kindergarten group develop software that lets kids make things, like animated stories or interactive Lego models.

RESNICK: Very often, traditional learning has taken the form of delivering information, delivering instruction. And the view has been if we just find a better way to deliver the instruction, kids will learn more. But I think research has shown that learning happens when kids, and adults for that matter, actively construct new ideas. There’s the expression we “get” ideas. We don’t “get” ideas. We make ideas. So I think that yes, there’s some role for just delivering information. But I think the most important creative experiences come when kids are actively engaged in making new ideas through their interactions with the world.

The program is called Lifelong Kindergarten because Resnick thinks the ideas should extend well beyond childhood.

RESNICK: We focus on four guiding principles that I call the four Ps of creative learning: projects, passion, peers, and play. So we feel that the best way to support kids developing as creative thinkers and developing their creative capacities is to engage them in working on projects based on their passions in collaboration with peers in a playful spirit. We lead most of our lives by working on projects. A marketing manager coming up with the new ad campaign is working on a project. A journalist writing the article is working on a project; in our personal life, we plan someone’s birthday party. That’s a project. So we want kids to learn about the process of making projects. We also want them to work on things that they’re passionate about. We’ve seen over and over that people are willing to work longer and harder and persist in the face of challenges when they’re working on things they really care about. They also make deeper connection to ideas when they’re working on projects that they really care about. The third P of peers — we’ve seen that learning is a social activity, that the best learning happens in collaboration and sharing with others. We learn with and from others. Then the final P of play, I sometimes call the most misunderstood P. Often when people think about play they just think about fun and laughter. And I have nothing against fun and laughter but that’s not the essence what I’m talking about. I see play not just as an activity but a type of attitude and approach for engaging with the world. When someone has a playful approach, it means they’re constantly experimenting, trying new things, taking risks, testing the boundaries. And I think the most creative activities come about what we’re willing to experiment and take risks. Jennifer EGAN: I remember when I would come home from school and no one was home and I didn’t have a plan. There was this almost mysterious excitement that I would feel about just being alone.

That’s the writer Jennifer Egan , who won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel A Visit From the Goon Squad .

EGAN: I have to say, I feel I lost touch with that through maybe even decades of my life where I was so worried about what everyone else was doing, how I measured up, how what I should be doing as opposed to what I was doing whether there was some important thing everyone else was doing that I should be doing too. And this was before social media. I think this is a scourge for young people now. From everything I hear. But if I can get that out of my head, which I find easier and easier as I get older, there’s a feeling that there’s sort of a mystery that’s waiting for me that I can possibly enter. There’s so many childhood narratives that are really about this. I mean, The Secret Garden , all the Narnia books about passing through a membrane or a border or a door or jumping into a pool and being in another world. It’s a really basic fantastical longing. This wish to be at a distance from one’s own life and to touch something outside it, which is first of all thrilling in and of itself. And second of all returns you to your real life charged in some way. That’s what fiction writing does for me. ISAACSON: I think that when we’re young, we really indulge our wonder years.

Walter Isaacson again.

ISAACSON: That notion of playing and being imaginative, and having downtime where you can be creative — that’s something we sometimes lose in our school systems today.

One beneficiary of this creative downtime? Leonardo da Vinci.

ISAACSON: He had the great fortune to be born out of wedlock, which meant that he couldn’t go to one of the Latin schools that middle-class families of the Renaissance went to. And so he’s self-taught — he sits by a stream and puts rocks and different obstacles in it to see how the water swirls, and he draws it. And then he looks at how air swirls. All of these things you get to do when you’re young, you’re full of wonder, and you’re using your imagination. We see that in Ben Franklin as a young kid, just being interested in, “Why does condensation form on the outside of a cold cup?” The type of thing that maybe we thought about, but somehow we quit thinking about. So that’s the number-one secret of being imaginative and creative, is almost being childlike in your sense of wonder. Albert Einstein said that. He said, “I’m not necessarily smarter than anybody else, but I was able to retain my childlike sense of wonder at the marvels of creation in which we find ourselves.”

But Walter Isaacson — like Mitch Resnick and Teresa Amabile — isn’t calling for a ban on conventional instruction.

ISAACSON: I think that creativity is something you can nurture, and even try to teach. But more importantly, creativity without skill — creativity without training and learning — can be squandered. If Louis Armstrong had not found somebody — King Oliver — to teach him how to play the cornet, all of his imagination would have been lost. So we should not disparage the role of training, of learning. The same is true of Einstein — as a little kid, he’s wondering how the compass needle twitches and points north. What’s important is that he goes to the Zurich Polytech and starts understanding the concepts behind Maxwell’s equations. So people who think we should just nurture creativity without the skill sets and the training that allow creativity to be turned into action, to allow for things like applied creativity, they’re being too romantic about it. Leonardo had to work in Verrocchio’s workshop and learn how to do a brush stroke.

There are, of course, plenty of obstacles that may keep a person from gaining both proper instruction and the latitude to play and imagine. Nor is every kid lucky enough to grow up with two parents as talented and creative as Tibor and Maira Kalman. Or with parents like Margaret Geller’s, taking her to Bell Labs and indulging her passion for acting. These are privileges, not rights. They’re not always fully appreciated. Here’s John Hodgman , the comedian, author, and former Daily Show correspondent.

John HODGMAN: People who are hand-to-mouthing it and are really economically anxious, of course they’re going to have a disadvantage to, say, an affluent white dude from Brookline, Massachusetts who is an only child who had the full benefit of all of his parents’ love and never had to share anything in his life. I had a lot of time to sit around thinking and daydreaming to the point where, when I went to college, my dad said, “I don’t care what you do in college, I ask you only that you take a single course in bookkeeping and finance, so you know how that world works.” And I was like, “Dad, I love you, but no way.” DUBNER: Really? That wasn’t a big ask on your father’s part. HODGMAN: Even that. I know, fathers, I know. DUBNER: What a spoiled brat you were. HODGMAN: Totally. This is what I’m saying. I’ve regretted it every day of my life. It was an incredibly selfish and ridiculous thing to do, because I was spending his money to go to college. And yet I was like, “No, I’m going to sit on the grass and read 100 Years of Solitude for the fifth time.” You could make an argument that it paid off for me, to a certain degree. But I mean, look: art comes out of all communities everywhere. Communities of means and communities of no means. I mean, the greatest art movement of the 20th and 21st century, that is probably the most globally meaningful art movement, is the development of hip-hop, which was creation in the South Bronx by young people who were obviously not affluent.

John Hodgman sure sounds like he’s got a grip on the causes and consequences of creativity. Wouldn’t you say? And that he’s got his own creative ducks in a row. He’s had a lot of creative and commercial success. But do not be deceived. If you think prior success insulates a creative person from — well, anything, you should think again.

HODGMAN: I mean, let me put it this way: I am a person for whom being creative is terrifying. It is the most rewarding thing that I can do. But it is a constant struggle with a very clear feeling that I am out of gas every day, every day. And that I will not be able to support myself or my family, because I have now finally run out of ideas, for sure, this time, I mean it. It’s not even a fear. It is a certainty that I’m done, that I have no further ideas, and I’ve been doing this — this and only this, whatever this is — now for 21 years.

We’ll explore that fear, and many other aspects of creativity, in future episodes of this series. Until then, keep your ears open for a bonus episode, our full conversation with Elvis Costello, who’s had one of the most extraordinary careers in modern music and has just put out a wonderful new record, called Look Now .

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Stephanie Tam and Matt Frassica . Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow ,  Greg Rippin , Alvin Melathe ,  Harry Huggins , and Zack Lapinski . Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by  Luis Guerra . You can subscribe to  Freakonomics Radio  on  Apple Podcasts ,  Stitcher , or  wherever you get your podcasts .

• Teresa Amabile , psychologist and professor emerita at the Harvard Business School.
• Michael Bierut , graphic designer.
• Pat Brown , chief executive and founder of Impossible Foods Inc.
• Rosanne Cash , singer-songwriter.
• Elvis Costello , musician, singer, songwriter, and composer.
• Mark Duplass , film director, film producer, and actor.
• James Dyson , inventor, industrial design engineer and founder of the Dyson company.
• Jennifer Egan , novelist and journalist.
• David Galenson , economist at the University of Chicago.
• Margaret Geller , astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
• Ed Glaeser , professor of economics at Harvard University.
• John Hodgman , humorist.
• Walter Isaacson , biographer and professor of history at Tulane University.
• Alex Kalman , co-founder, director, and curator of the Mmuseumm
• Maira Kalman , illustrator, writer, artist, and designer.
• Wynton Marsalis , American musician, composer and bandleader.
• Nico Muhly , composer.
• Mitch Resnick , leader of the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the M.I.T. Media Lab.
• Dean Simonton , professor emeritus of psychology at University of California, Davis.
• Ai Weiwei , contemporary artist and activist.
• Creativity In Context   by Teresa Amabile (Routledge 1996).
• A Visit From the Goon Squad   by Jennifer Egan (Knopf 2010).
• Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play by Mitch Resnick (M.I.T. 2017).

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Do schools kill creativity - sir ken robinson.

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Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

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Is school 'killing' your child's creativity? And does this matter?

Rote learning, controlling teachers and a "fixation" on standardised tests are crushing children's creativity, according to a school principal who is on a mission to change things.

Paul Browning has been principal of North Brisbane's St Paul's School since 2008 and is hoping to convince the Federal Government to take a closer look at creative teaching in primary and secondary schools.

"Most teachers would be aware of Sir Ken Robinson's great quote where he says that schools successfully kill creativity," Dr Browning told ABC News Breakfast.

"I think that occurs more so in Australia because we're so fixated on standardised testing and getting results against national benchmarks."

He said it was vital for teachers to find new ways of nurturing creativity, because the current system had become too rigid.

"We're rote teaching. We're forced to teach to the test," he said.

"As a result of that, we're actually killing creativity in young people and when they get to tertiary, there's no point trying to resurrect it if it's already dead."

The issue of creativity and innovation has come into the spotlight in recent years as technological changes bring about major shifts in the jobs market.

In response, the Federal Government launched an inquiry in November to ensure Australia's tertiary system was producing graduates able to "meet the needs of a future labour force focused on innovation and creativity".

Specifically, the inquiry will examine "the extent to which students are graduating with the skills needed for the jobs of today and of the future".

Dr Browning said it was a laudable goal, but he has made a submission calling for the terms of reference to be expanded beyond tertiary level to include primary and secondary schools as well.

"Our argument is there's no point trying to resurrect [creativity] at a tertiary level if it's already been extinguished by our schooling system at the moment," he said.

That sentiment is shared by Kay Margetts, an associate professor in early childhood studies at Melbourne University.

"We have a very crowded curriculum, so there's not a lot of room for children to have time to be imaginative, to be creative," she said.

"This crowded curriculum does restrict teachers' willingness to spend time on a big question and delving into that. They have to move on to the next thing, otherwise the bell's going to go and we have to move onto the next period."

However, while Dr Margetts welcomed further inquiry into early childhood creativity, she was cautious of making the current inquiry too broad and diluting its impact.

The most recent review of the national curriculum was completed in 2014 and a spokesman for the Federal Education Minister, Simon Birmingham, said this week there were no plans to widen the current inquiry to look beyond the tertiary level.

Still, that doesn't mean Dr Browning doesn't have other suggestions for teachers in the short-term.

"Probably one of the biggest things teachers can do is let go of control themselves," he said.

"As adults we like to control the world around us and in the classroom teachers tend to like to control what they actually do as well.

"It's that sort of control and fear, I suppose, of not achieving … what you think you should be achieving, that creates those inhibitions and the language we use when we're teaching young children which puts them in a place where they don't want to take risks or try new things."

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What Kills Creativity: Top Factors and How to Overcome Them

By: Author Paul Jenkins

Posted on May 18, 2023

Categories Creativity

Creativity is the powerhouse behind innovative ideas and groundbreaking concepts. However, it can be a fragile force, susceptible to being stifled by various factors. Understanding what kills creativity is essential to fostering an environment that encourages original thinking and nurtures this intangible resource.

Numerous aspects can hinder the creative process, from internal struggles like self-doubt and fear of failure to external factors like excessive stress and rigid structures. For instance, performance evaluations can impact organizational creativity if not implemented carefully. Furthermore, intrinsic motivation is pivotal in preserving creativity, as emphasized by the Intrinsic Motivation Principle of Creativity .

Individuals and organizations can create conditions that foster and inspire rather than hinder creative potential by identifying and addressing these creativity killers. This understanding is crucial for unlocking the full spectrum of creative capabilities, paving the way for ground-breaking achievements in various fields.

Why Creativity Matters

Creativity plays a crucial role in various aspects of life, from personal growth to problem-solving in the workplace. It fosters innovation and allows individuals and organizations to develop unique and effective solutions to challenges in different situations. By valuing creativity, we encourage a mindset that embraces the power of divergent thinking and the exploration of new ideas.

Creative thinking enables individuals to see beyond traditional approaches and offers fresh perspectives to address complex issues. The creative solutions from this process often lead to more efficient and effective outcomes, paving the way for progress. Individuals can unlock their full potential and transform their surroundings by cultivating creative energy.

Some key benefits of creativity include:

• Encouraging personal growth and adaptability
• Developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills
• Boosting collaboration and communication in professional settings
• Driving advancements in technology, art, and sciences

In a rapidly changing world, fostering an environment that nurtures creativity and allows continued learning and growth is essential. Encouraging creative thinking in personal and professional situations can lead to better decision-making, increased teamwork, and a more innovative and prosperous society.

How Schools Kill Creativity

One of the major concerns in today’s educational system is the belief that schools kill creativity. Sir Ken Robinson, a renowned education expert and speaker, long argued that the current approach to education stifles children’s creative growth.

Traditional educational systems tend to promote linear thinking, putting emphasis on subjects like math, science, and language as opposed to art, music, and other creative pursuits. This often results in a hierarchical view of subjects, where creativity is undervalued in favor of more “practical” skills. Such an approach can push students towards a specific pathway, discouraging them from exploring their creative interests.

In addition, many schools employ standardized testing to assess students’ academic performance. This evaluation method encourages memorization and repetition rather than fostering innovative problem-solving skills. When students become fixated on achieving high test scores, they may neglect to develop their creative abilities, as they are not rewarded or recognized similarly.

Moreover, the structure of the school day can also dampen creativity. Rigid schedules, long hours, and limited opportunities for self-directed learning can all contribute to a less-than-ideal environment for nurturing creative thinking. When children constantly follow strict timetables with defined outcomes, they may lack the freedom and autonomy to explore their imaginations.

Lastly, the fear of failure is another factor that can be detrimental to students’ creativity. In school, making mistakes can often be perceived negatively, causing students to avoid taking risks or trying novel approaches to problem-solving. This mindset inhibits their ability to experiment, iterate, and learn from their experiences, which are essential to the creative process.

In conclusion, several factors within the educational system, such as a focus on linear thinking, standardized testing, rigid structures, and the fear of failure, can stifle student creativity. Addressing these issues may be essential in ensuring that children can develop their creative potential and foster innovative thinking for the future.

Factors That Kill Creativity

Insecurity and fear of mistakes.

Many creative individuals struggle with insecurity, which can be a significant creativity killer. Fear of making mistakes or receiving criticism can prevent a person from taking risks and exploring new ideas. Creative people must understand that mistakes are a natural part of the creative process and can lead to new insights and solutions. As mentioned by Psychology Today , overcoming insecurities is crucial for enabling one’s full creative potential.

Distractions and Lack of Focus

Modern life is filled with distractions, which can hinder the creative process. Social media, television, and other external stimuli can fragment a person’s attention and prevent them from fully immersing in creative work. Distractions can also steal the valuable time and energy needed to develop skills and refine creative ideas. Creative people must establish routines and strategies for minimizing distractions and maintaining focus on their work.

Poor Work Environment

A person’s surroundings play a critical role in their ability to think creatively and produce innovative work. A cluttered, noisy, or uncomfortable workspace can dampen a person’s energy and interfere with the creative process. A well-designed work environment that promotes relaxation, concentration, and inspiration fosters a more conducive atmosphere for creative thinking and problem-solving.

Lack of Motivation and Productivity

Even the most talented creative geniuses can struggle with motivation and productivity. Creative people often have multiple interests and ideas, making maintaining momentum on a single project difficult. External pressures, such as deadlines or financial concerns, can sap enthusiasm and stifle creativity. Developing a clear vision, setting achievable goals, and maintaining a disciplined routine can help creative individuals maintain motivation and productivity.

Rigid Thinking and Mental Blocks

Rigid thinking and mental blocks can inhibit a person’s ability to approach complex problems with flexibility and openness, which is essential for generating creative solutions. Sometimes, preconceived notions and established habits can limit a person’s ability to see new possibilities or explore unconventional ideas. Adopting a growth mindset, continuously learning, and embracing challenges can help counteract these obstacles and free up mental space for fresh, innovative thinking.

The Role of Leadership in Nurturing Creativity

Leaders play a crucial role in nurturing creativity within organizations, as they can create an environment that promotes creative potential and encourages the growth of creative capacity. Leaders must deeply understand how to foster creativity among their team members and develop an innovative organizational culture.

One of the key factors in promoting creativity is establishing a culture of trust and psychological safety. Employees must feel comfortable expressing their ideas and exploring new avenues without fearing reprisal or judgment. Leaders who display empathy, actively listen to their employees, and encourage them to take risks create an environment conducive to creativity. A study on the role of leader emotional intelligence shows how leaders can positively influence employee creativity by displaying these traits.

Leaders should also know how their attitudes and behaviors may influence team creativity. Creativity can sometimes be unintentionally stifled due to organizational constraints and the leaders’ misconceptions about nurturing creative talent. Research on nurturing creativity in the classroom suggests that teachers who can support creativity within the given curricular constraints significantly impact students’ creative development.

Some strategies that leaders can implement to nurture creativity within their organizations include:

• Providing challenging and engaging tasks: Encourage employees to take on challenging projects, as this can help them push their creative boundaries and discover new ideas.
• Encouraging collaboration and diversity: Diverse teams with different perspectives are more likely to develop creative solutions. Encourage employees to collaborate with their colleagues in different departments, fostering interdisciplinary connections.
• Rewarding creativity and innovation: Recognize and reward employees with creative thinking and innovative problem-solving skills. This recognition can motivate them to continue pursuing new and creative ideas.
• Offering continuous learning opportunities: Support employee development by providing access to resources, training, and opportunities to expand their knowledge in their respective fields.

In conclusion, leaders have a significant role in nurturing creativity within their organizations by understanding the factors that impact creative potential, cultivating an environment that encourages creative capacity, and implementing strategies that foster creative thinking and innovation among employees.

Tips to Boost Creativity

Encouraging divergent thinking.

Divergent thinking plays a crucial role in fostering creativity. It enables individuals to explore multiple solutions and consider various perspectives on a problem. Leaders should encourage their team members to think independently and generate innovative ideas. By valuing creative output and embracing the potential of original ideas, motivation among creatives is likely to increase.

Embracing Mistakes and Failure

Mistakes and failures should be seen as opportunities for growth and learning. This mindset helps people take risks, generate new concepts, and improve their creative ability. Encourage team members to learn from their mistakes, iterate on their ideas, and refine their approaches. This fosters an environment conducive to the development of a great idea.

Establishing a Conducive Work Environment

A work environment that supports creativity and productivity is essential for unlocking the full potential of creatives. This can include providing ample resources, flexible working hours, and comfortable physical space. It’s essential to identify and eliminate any factors that might hinder creative thinking. By addressing potential distractions and ensuring a positive atmosphere, you can significantly enhance the creative output of your team members.

Promoting Collaboration and Idea Sharing

Collaboration and idea sharing is crucial for stirring creativity and generating good ideas. Encouraging open communication, brainstorming sessions, and team discussions can help boost the creative process. When team members feel comfortable contributing their thoughts and ideas, they’re more likely to be engaged and motivated, leading to higher productivity overall.

Investing in Personal Growth and Skill Development

Investing in your team members’ personal growth and skill development can significantly enhance their creativity. Encourage continuous learning, offer training opportunities, and provide resources for skill development. As individuals grow and become more proficient in their fields, they’re more likely to generate creative solutions and contribute to the team’s success.

By adopting these strategies in your approach to leadership, you can help foster an environment that promotes creativity and encourages the development of innovative ideas. Remember that creativity is an ongoing process, and investing in the well-being and growth of your team members will ultimately lead to a more successful and dynamic organization.

In summary, creativity can be hindered by various factors, such as restrictive environments, fear of failure, and lack of support. However, it is important to remember that schools themselves do not inherently kill creativity. Rather, the way educational institutions are structured and facilitated can either nurture or stifle creative thinking.

One significant point to consider is the need for interdisciplinary learning and collaboration. Schools can promote an environment where creativity thrives by encouraging students to explore multiple subjects and areas of interest. This approach alleviates the pressure to specialize in only one field, thus fostering an atmosphere that encourages experimentation and innovative thinking.

Another essential aspect is the role of educators in promoting creativity. Teachers must be trained to identify and nurture students’ creative talents and create open and safe spaces for expression and exploration. This includes incorporating various teaching methods, such as hands-on learning, problem-solving exercises, and encouraging student collaboration.

To further support creativity in educational settings, it is crucial to emphasize the importance of constructive feedback and failure as learning opportunities. Students should be encouraged to take risks, make mistakes, and learn from them. This mindset is fundamental in fostering a growth mindset, ultimately contributing to creative development.

In conclusion, the claim that schools kill creativity oversimplifies a complex issue. By implementing a more holistic approach to education that includes interdisciplinary learning, promoting a growth mindset, and supporting educators as facilitators of creativity, schools can become spaces where creativity not only survives but flourishes.

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How to Kill Creativity

• Teresa M. Amabile

Keep doing what you’re doing. Or, if you want to spark innovation, rethink how you motivate, reward, and assign work to people.

The Idea in Brief

If the mantra for the current business climate is Innovate or die , why do so many companies seem to be choosing the latter option?

Creativity gets killed much more often than it gets supported. The problem is not that managers smother creativity intentionally—the business need for coordination and control can inadvertently undermine employees’ ability to put existing ideas together in new and useful ways.

To foster an innovative workplace, you need to pay attention to employees’ expertise, creative-thinking skills, and motivation. Of these three, employees’ motivation—specifically, their intrinsic motivation, or passion for a certain kind of challenge—is the most potent lever a manager can use to boost creativity and his company’s future success.

The Idea in Practice

In business, it isn’t enough for an idea to be original—the idea must also be useful, appropriate, and actionable. It must somehow influence the way business gets done—for example, by significantly improving a product or service.

Within every individual, creativity exists as a function of three components:

1. expertise (technical, procedural, and intellectual knowledge). The broader the expertise, the larger the intellectual space a person has to explore and solve problems.

2. creative-thinking skills. These aptitudes, shaped by an individual’s personality, determine how flexibly and imaginatively someone approaches problems.

3. motivation. Expertise and creative-thinking skills provide an individual’s natural resources for creativity; motivation determines what a person will actually do.

Extrinsic motivation comes from outside the individual—whether it’s the offer of a bonus or the threat of firing. Extrinsic motivation doesn’t prevent people from being creative, but in many situations it doesn’t boost their creativity either. On its own, it can’t prompt people to be passionate about their work; in fact, it can lead them to feel bribed or controlled.

Intrinsic motivation, by contrast, comes from inside the individual. It’s a person’s abiding interest in certain activities or deep love of particular challenges. Employees are most creative when they are intrinsically motivated—in other words, when the work itself is motivating.

It can be time consuming to try to influence an employee’s expertise or creative-thinking skills. It’s easier to affect someone’s intrinsic motivation—and the results are more immediate. Activities that enhance intrinsic motivation fall into a few general categories: challenge, freedom, resources, work-group features, supervisory encouragement, and organizational support. Some specific recommendations:

• Match the right people with the right assignments, so employees are stretched but not stretched too thin. Work teams that have diverse perspectives will generate more creativity than homogenous groups.
• Give people freedom within the company’s goals. Tell them which mountain to climb, but let them decide how to climb it. Keep the objectives stable for a meaningful period of time—it’s hard to reach the top of a moving mountain.
• Allocate appropriate amounts of time and project resources. Organizations routinely kill creativity with fake deadlines—which cause distrust—and impossibly tight ones—which cause burnout.
• Let employees know that what they do matters. This will help them sustain their passion for the work.

When I consider all the organizations I have studied and worked with over the past 22 years, there can be no doubt: creativity gets killed much more often than it gets supported. For the most part, this isn’t because managers have a vendetta against creativity. On the contrary, most believe in the value of new and useful ideas. However, creativity is undermined unintentionally every day in work environments that were established—for entirely good reasons—to maximize business imperatives such as coordination, productivity, and control.

• TA Teresa M. Amabile is a Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School and a coauthor of The Progress Principle . Her current research investigates how life inside organizations can influence people and their performance, as well as how people approach and experience the transition to retirement.

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