Fully Functioning Persons - Educational Achievement

Schools are anxious that the children they educate grow into fully functioning persons. This has long been an avowed and widely approved purpose of education. We say that education in a democracy should help individuals fully develop their talents. Recently there have been pressures to limit this to intellectual talents. There has been much talk about limiting the school's concern to the full development of the intellect only.

Even with this limited definition of the goals of education, the abilities involved in creative thinking cannot be ignored. There has been increasing recognition of the fact that traditional measures of intelligence attempt to assess only a few of man's thinking abilities. Certainly we cannot say that one is fully functioning mentally, if the abilities involved in creative thinking remain undeveloped or are paralyzed. These are the abilities involved in becoming aware of problems, thinking up possible solutions, and testing them. If their functioning is impaired, one's capacity for coping with life's problems is indeed marginal.

Educational Achievement

Almost no one disputes the legitimacy of the school's concern about educational achievement. Teachers and guidance workers are asked to help under-achievers to make better use of their intellectual resources and to help over-achievers become better "rounded" personalities. But, how do you tell who is an under- or over-achiever? In my opinion, recent findings concerning the role of the creative thinking abilities in educational achievement call for a revision of these long-used concepts.

We are finding that the creative thinking abilities contribute importantly to the acquisition of information and various educational skills. Of course, we have long known that it is natural for man to learn creatively, but we have always thought that it was more economical to teach by authority. Recent experiments have shown that apparently many things can be learned creatively more economically than they can by authority, and that some people strongly prefer to learn creatively.

Traditional tests of intelligence are heavily loaded with tasks requiring cognition, memory, and convergent thinking. Such tests have worked rather well in predicting school achievement. When children are taught by authority these are the abilities required. Recent and ongoing studies, however, show that even traditional subject matter and educational skills can be taught in such a way that the creative thinking abilities are important for their acquisition.

Most of these findings are illustrated dramatically in a study conducted during three years in the University of Minnesota Laboratory Elementary School. We differentiated the highly creative children (as identified by our tests of creative thinking) from the highly intelligent. The highly creative group ranked in the upper 20 per cent on creative thinking but not on intelligence. The highly intelligent group ranked in the upper 20 per cent on intelligence but not on creativity. Those who were in the upper 20 per cent on both measures were eliminated, but the overlap was small. In fact, if we were to identify children as gifted on the basis of intelligence tests, we would eliminate from consideration approximately 70 per cent of the most creative. This percentage seems to hold fairly well, no matter what measure of intelligence we use and no matter what educational level we study, from kindergarten through graduate school.
Although there is an average difference of over 25 IQ points between these two groups, there are no statistically significant differences in any of the achievement measures used either year.

It is of special interest that the children with high IQ's were rated by their teachers as more desirable, better known or understood, more ambitious, and more hardworking or studious. In other words, the highly creative child appears to learn as much as the highly intelligent one, at least in some schools, without appearing to work as hard. My guess is that these highly creative children are learning and thinking when they appear to be "playing around." Their tendency is to learn creatively more effectively than by authority. They may engage in manipulative and/or exploratory activities, many of which are discouraged or even forbidden. They enjoy learning and thinking, and this looks like play rather than work.