Teaching Creative Thinking: What the Torrances Learned From 142 Experiments

That some people are simply born more creative than others, and nothing can be done about it. That past a certain age, it is too late to learn to think better. That children can learn to read and do arithmetic, but not to come up with better ideas. E. Paul Torrance and J. Pansy Torrance heard these beliefs over and over, and not only from children: from highly educated adults too.

In 1973, the two published Is creativity teachable?, a short book from the Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, written in nontechnical language for teachers and the general public. He chaired the department of educational psychology at the University of Georgia; she, a specialist in creative problem solving, was associate director of the Georgia Studies of Creative Behavior. They answer the question with two kinds of evidence: more than fifteen years of teaching creative thinking to groups of all ages, and a survey of 142 experiments.

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A Natural Process That Takes Skills

The authors define creative thinking as a natural human process: becoming aware of a problem or a gap in information for which one has no learned response, searching for solutions in one’s own experience and that of others, forming hypotheses, evaluating and testing them, modifying them, and communicating the results. If it is natural, why teach it at all?

Paul Torrance and his students once suspected that favorable conditions or a good warm-up, meaning preliminary exercises that get people ready to think, might be enough. After more than twenty experiments, they found that some warm-ups and rewards did help. But even under the best conditions, the lack of basic skills was a handicap, and the quality of the thinking was usually disappointing.

Those skills are concrete: defining problems, combining what one already knows, producing alternatives, developing criteria and applying them, testing the most promising ideas, and planning how to carry out the best one. All of them require practice and can be enhanced by teaching. The process also has emotional and irrational elements: the creative idea does not come from logic, although it has to be subjected to logic afterwards.

Still, the authors promise no miracles: “no teaching and no disciplined approach to creative problem solving will guarantee creativity. They only increase the probability that creativity will occur” (p. 7). They also admit they could be fooling themselves, since their long-range follow-up has not been systematic.

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142 Experiments, Nine Ways to Stimulate Creativity

Paul Torrance surveyed 142 experiments on whether creativity can be taught, in a review he published in 1972 in the Journal of Creative Behavior. He included only studies with empirical evidence, meaning measured data, involving elementary and high school students; college students and adults were left out. He sorted them into nine categories by method and gave each a success score: 1 if it attained all its measured objectives, and a fraction if it attained only some.

For instance, if of four measures of divergent thinking (fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration) only originality improved over the control group, the one that does not receive the program, the score was 0.25. Overall, the experiments attained 72% of their objectives, with wide differences between methods:

• Osborn-Parnes creative problem-solving procedures and their modifications (22 studies): 91%;
• other disciplined approaches, such as general semantics training or creative research methods (5): 92%;
• the creative arts as vehicles (18): 81%;
• media and reading programs (10): 78%;
• programs with packaged materials (25): 72%;
• facilitating testing conditions (16): 69%;
• motivation, reward, and competition (12): 67%;
• teacher-classroom and climate variables (26): 55%;
• curricular and administrative arrangements (8): 50%.

The disciplined problem-solving methods score above 90%; those that only change school organization or classroom interaction score around half.

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A Six-Hour Workshop in Problem Solving

To illustrate the most successful method, the authors describe a six-hour mini-module, split into two sessions, that Pansy Torrance teaches to schoolchildren; the text follows a group of tenth graders. A pretest, repeated at the end, asks them to list uses for an everyday object in three minutes, to state a pet peeve as a problem, and to explain what “yardsticks,” or criteria, they use to choose among several ideas.

The first step is defining the problem. A Beetle Bailey cartoon, in which Beetle is caught painting his sergeant with horns on a wall, shows that one situation holds many problems: keeping Sarge from seeing him, keeping Sarge from seeing the wall, convincing him it is an April Fool’s joke. Students usually find twelve to fifteen, and they learn to word them as open questions that begin “In what ways might…?” Young people, the authors note, grasp this step faster than older people.

The second step is generating ideas through brainstorming and its four rules: criticism is ruled out, freewheeling is welcome, quantity is wanted, and combination and improvement are sought. Working in pairs, students practiced each rule for three minutes: with no criticism they produced 65 ideas; freewheeling, 109; going for quantity, 224; and combining, 158, a drop they put down to finding the last problem less interesting. In the second session, a collection of spoons can be used to demonstrate SCAMPER, an acronym for ways to transform something: substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to other uses, eliminate, or rearrange.

The third step is evaluation. Each student picks their five best ideas and sets at least four criteria. The girl who wanted to keep other horses out of her own horses’ stalls weighed the work involved, the feelings of the other owners, the trouble she might get into, and the feelings of her horses. The ideas are compared on one criterion at a time and ranked from 1 to 5, and the one with the lowest total wins. On the pretest, the students averaged one criterion; on the posttest, 5.5.

The authors admit that six hours is not enough, but they find it helps students look at a problem in a more organized and productive way.

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The Creative Arts: Another Path That Works

In one experiment with fifth graders, some groups had creative dramatics sessions: starting from a story, a film, or a painting, they acted out roles. Although they left their classroom for fifty minutes a day for eight weeks, they read as well at the end as the children who stayed in class, and only they made significant gains (gains unlikely to be due to chance) in originality and elaboration on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking.

The creative arts seem especially promising with disadvantaged and ethnic minority groups that value the arts. The authors’ 1971 workshop shows how: three weeks, four hours a day, and 91 boys and girls aged 6 to 13, most from low-income families living near the park where it was held. Drama, music, dance, sculpture, and painting were combined with thirty minutes of creative problem-solving training each day, and in the last week every team worked on how to improve the park.

The final tests showed significant gains in the ability to produce original ideas. But the authors cared more about what the workshop leaders saw: children who were more involved, curious, and persistent, better able to withstand failure, and more sensitive to others.

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What Worked Less: Classroom Climate and Motivation Alone

Studies that relied on teachers’ own creative thinking abilities rather consistently failed to show significant results; their creative motivations mattered more. Most of the studies of classroom interaction were unsuccessful, but most were doctoral studies without strong commitment from the schools, and where highly competent, seasoned people were involved, the results were much more promising.

In an experiment with 24 second graders, fifteen-minute teacher-led discussions came before free play in which the children simulated a harbor and an airport. When the teacher set everything in advance, with questions that had right or wrong answers, convergent thinking showed up more often in the play: accurate, agreed-upon answers. When the structure was built with the children, from their own interests, divergent thinking showed up more often: original and flexible.

Motivation alone can make a difference, but it has to be reapplied each time and cannot be counted on to keep creative thinking going.

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Teaching on Purpose

The authors’ answer is yes: it does seem possible to teach creative thinking. And they spell out how: “The most successful approaches seem to be those that involve both cognitive and emotional functioning, provide adequate structure and motivation, and give opportunities for involvement, practice, and interaction with teachers and other students” (p. 46). Favorable conditions help, but the differences are greatest and most predictable when deliberate teaching is involved.

For researchers, the book is an early synthesis with stated limits: it covers only schoolchildren, scores success from 0 to 1, and sometimes relies on abstracts rather than full reports. For educators, it shows that these techniques are taught through steps, exercises, and criteria. For professionals, it shows that defining a problem, generating ideas, and choosing with criteria are trainable skills: the authors also teach the method to nurses and other professional groups.

The article Can Creativity Be Taught? takes up the same question from other sources. And the creativity course follows the mini-module’s steps: Week 9 teaches how to identify problem areas, Week 10 how to generate potential solutions, Week 11 how to evaluate their feasibility, and Week 12 how to apply problem-solving methodologies.

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