A sequential design characterized by a mixture of a cross-sectional and a nine-month follow-up longitudinal design was used to allow both between and within groups comparisons. Two schools using the "through-train mode" for school promotion were invited to participate in order to ensure that follow-up measures could be made. A total of 405 schoolchildren (213 boys, 192 girls) completed the study, with 144 in the G5-6 group (i.e., grade promotion from Grade 5 to Grade 6), 142 in the G6-7 group (i.e., school transition from Grade 6 to Grade 7), and 119 in the G7-8 group (i.e., grade promotion from Grade 7 to Grade 8). The creative thinking, stress levels, and conventionality in thinking of the participants were measured using three parallel forms of the Test for Creative Thinking-Drawing Production (TCT-DP), Stress Appraisal Measures (SAM), and the Conventionality Test at 3 time-points (i.e., before, during, and after promotion to a new school or higher grade). / In the fast-changing modern world, creativity has become increasingly important for dealing with complex problems and opportunities. Improving creativity is therefore important for both individuals and societies. Studying creativity development can help us to infer the contributing factors that may hinder or enhance creativity. Studies on creativity development during childhood and adolescence have suggested that a creativity slump is a special, but common, phenomenon. Yet it remains unclear why a creativity slump occurs at a specific age or at a specific time of development. The present dissertation provides a direct empirical comparison of two competing hypotheses on the creativity slump. The school transition stress hypothesis, drawn from the continuity or experience perspective of human development, suggests that a creativity slump is related to the stress associated with school transition, whereas the cognitive-developmental hypothesis, which takes the stage perspective of human development, suggests that the conventional thinking stage inhibits the expression of creativity and is hence conducive to a slump. The explanatory power of these two theoretical perspectives in relation to a creativity slump was tested by addressing the research question as to whether a creativity slump would still occur if school transition occurred at the cognitive stage that is beyond the conventional thinking stage (i.e., the postconventional thinking stage). The study explicitly compared the relative contribution of stress appraisal and conventionality in thinking to creativity development. / In the present study, it was found that a creativity slump still occurred when school transition took place during the postconventional thinking stage, lending support to the school transition stress hypothesis, but not to the cognitive-developmental hypothesis, regarding a creativity slump at school transition. We further clarified the specific roles of cognitive appraisals of stress in relation to creativity. Negative stress appraisals (i.e., appraising school life as threatening) were negatively predictive of creativity, whereas positive stress appraisals (i.e., appraising school life as challenging and controllable) were positively predictive of creativity. Regarding the role of level of conventionality in thinking in creativity, the results suggest that although postconventional thinking has a positive effect on creative thinking, its effect on creative thinking is significantly mediated by stress appraisals. The results also showed individual differences in experiencing a creativity slump. The statistic that only 44.4% of the students in the school transition group experienced a slump lends support to the idea that a creativity slump is neither overwhelming nor unavoidable. In accounting for these individual differences, stress appraisal variables were found to be the significant predictors when both the stress appraisal and conventionality in thinking variables were included in the logistic regression equation to predict the occurrence of a slump. / The present dissertation contributes to the current literature by offering empirical evidence to address the explanatory power of the cognitive-relational theory of stress and the cognitive-developmental perspective in relation to the existence of a creativity slump. The findings suggest that the major factors that are detrimental to creative thinking at school transition are negative appraisals and lack of positive appraisals on school life (i.e., viewing school life as more threatening, less challenging, and less controllable). These findings are helpful for understanding the critical factors that either facilitate or hinder the development of creativity in schoolchildren, which, in turn, could shed further light on effective creativity education. / He Wu, Jing. / Adviser: Wan Chi Wong. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-03, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 125-138). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese; form A-C, appendix III in Chinese.

Lin, Bilian. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 79-96). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts also in Chinese.

Idea generation is the essence of design as everyday problem solving. Generating ideas can be a matter of life and death or simply a distraction from our normal existence. The eureka moment also means that sometimes people improvise and repurpose whatever is at hand to solve their own problems. As a consequence, a chair becomes a bookshelf; a shoelace can be used to stop bleeding. Generating alternative uses for common household objects should be facilitated by generating alternative situations in which improvisational design might be needed. One way to encourage as many alternative ideas as possible is to think through heuristics of discovery. A number of directions have emerged concerning what can be used as good design heuristics to trigger creative mindsets. Does "walking away from the problem" or "letting the mind wander" really help generate a greater number of alternative ideas? How might shifting a perspective activate proper associative processing and enhance creative performance? Prior studies in generating novel uses often directed people to focus on objects, situations, and events, or to switch between a different time or space. One plausible method yet to be studied systematically, however, is for participants to think of different roles people can take in a society, such as chef, physician, mechanic, athlete, and so on. This dissertation research sets out to uncover certain creative mindsets and potential design heuristics that promote alternative solutions to problems ordinary people encounter in daily life. The studies conducted for this dissertation particularly focus on two mindset conditions: the mind-wandering group was manipulated to "let things come to your mind" and the human-centric group was manipulated to "think of different roles," both conditions representing widespread beliefs among professional designers about generating ideas. In two online experiments, participants were asked to generate as many alternative uses of common household objects as they could using either the mind- wandering or the human-centric mindsets triggered by different search heuristics. Study 1 had a control group and names of objects. Study 2 presented pictures of objects to half the participants and names of objects to the other half. The dependent variables were the fluency of ideas, the originality of ideas, the diversity of assignable roles and the response time between ideas. Results in both studies support the effectiveness of thinking of different roles in the human-centric mindset condition in increasing the fluency of alternative uses and the originality of ideas. Participants given no particular search strategy frequently reported that they tended to have things come to their minds, but they didn’t differ from the mind- wandering mindset group and were outperformed by those using the human-centric mindset strategy. Furthermore, seeing pictures didn’t necessarily give either mindset group the edge in generating more uses and more original ideas. Presenting the names of objects and providing specific roles with the search heuristics seemed enough to help induce a diversity of roles and hence more alternative uses and more original ideas. Those who let their minds wander did take longer to generate ideas than those using the focused associations of roles. The general findings in the dissertation are consistent with previous research showing that those who generated more ideas were more likely to generate more original ideas and those who persisted in ideation more frequently produced more original uses. On the whole, this dissertation research provides significant evidence for the heuristics of roles as a powerful perspective shifter to enhance everyday design concepts for human scale.

This dissertation studies the relationship between collaboration networks and scientific creativity. It finds significant knowledge spillover from new collaborations to repeated collaborations, and proposes a network approach to understand scientific creativity at the egocentric network level beyond the boundary of teams. To understand the network effect (specifically, effects of tie strength) on creativity, it integrates literature on small groups and social networks and adopts a creative-process model. An inverted U-shaped relationship between tie strength and creativity is observed, because of the mixed impacts of tie strength at different stages of the creative process. Furthermore, it explores the effect of tie configurations and finds that the skewness of tie strength distribution moderates the effect of tie strength. In addition, it also tests two competing explanations for the association between strong tie and low creativity: creativity-decline hypothesis versus cost-reduction hypothesis. Finally, there is no evidence that collaboration networks would raise the visibility of previously published papers, but there is a significant prestige effect in gaining citations.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--School of Business and Public Administration and Dept. of Economics. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2007. / "A dissertation in public affairs and administration and economics." Advisor: Robyne Turner. Typescript. Vita. Title from "catalog record" of the print edition Description based on contents viewed Jan. 2, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 239-249). Online version of the print edition.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Freie Univ, Berlin, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 126-140).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed July 2, 2009). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 257-264).

Psychology of Education / M. Ed. (Sielkundige Opvoedkunde)

D.Ed. / Please refer to full text to view abstract