Creativity: an Investigation About How School Children Conceive the Creative Process

The society we live in "requires" creativity and such a request comes from many different fields. Even though a growing body of research stressed the importance of fostering children?s creativity, few attention is paid to investigate children?s conceptions about creativity, that is, implicit theories. The main purpose of this work is to investigate children?s creativity focusing on specific mental mechanisms involved in the creative process in order to catch any developmental changes and in order to explore the role of implicit theories. The book starts from a review of several contributions about implicit theories of creativity. The research is then described according to defined steps as follows: the definition and the application of an instrument to evaluate the restructuring act, a core mechanism of the creative process; the application of the instrument together with other tests to measure how children express their creativity and how they consider the creative people. Main evidences of the study are discussed and the conclusive section of the book arises important educational and methodological questions.