Teach Effectively!

Over on Kitchen Table Math Catherine Johnson has a note about several articles on creativity she’d read recently. Upon seeing the entry, I remembered that there are several very interesting—at least to me—behavioral studies of creativity. So I slipped over to the site for the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and ran a quick search. Here are some of the results (with links to the abstracts; one can download the full article by following the link to the abstract):

Maloney, K. B. & Hopkins, B. L. (1973). The modification of sentence structure and its relationship to subjective judgements of creativity in writing. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 6, 425-433. The present study objectively defined and manipulated some compositional variables in 10-sentence stories written by fourth- fifth- and sixth-grade students, and related these operationally defined variables to subjective judgements of cr….

Glover, J. & Gary, A. L. (1976). Procedures to increase some aspects of creativity. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 9, 79-84. Instructions, reinforcement (team points) and practice were applied to four behaviorally defined creative behaviors of eight fourth- and fifth-grade students. All four aspects (number of different responses, fluency; number of verb forms, flexibility; number of words per response, elaboration; and statistical infr….

Parsonson, B. S. & Baer, D. M. (1978). Training generalized improvisation of tools by preschool children. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 11, 363-380. The development of new, creative behaviors was examined in a problem-solving context. One form of problem solving, improvisation, was defined as finding a substitute to replace the specifically designated, but currently unavailable, tool ordinarily used to solve the problem. The study e….

Glover, J. A. (1979). The effectiveness of reinforcement and practice for enhancing the creative writing of elementary school children. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 12, 487. Reinforcement (team points) and practice were applied to the written work of 16 fifth graders on three operationally defined components of creative writing, fluency, flexibility, and originality. These three components were assessed via five response measures. Fluen….

Read to Ms. Johnson’s post.