Creativity has been suggested as a prime educational objective by national curriculum of Korea and research on creativity education has been increased since 2000s. How the researcher conceptualizes and approaches creativity affects the research. The ...
Creativity has been suggested as a prime educational objective by national curriculum of Korea and research on creativity education has been increased since 2000s. How the researcher conceptualizes and approaches creativity affects the research. The purpose of this study is to explore directions of creativity research in education by studying the method and subject of the research and analyzing its approach toward concept of creativity and its education.
For such research goals, this study establishes three research problems which are as follows.
First, what are types, research methods, and subjects of studies on creativity education.
Second, what perspective do studies on creativity education have on definition, focus, and level of creativity?
Third, what perspectives do studies on creativity education approach to creativity education?
This study gathered creativity researches which have been done on students in the elementary, middle, and high schools over the past ten years through Korean academic search database and came to a final selection of 378 studies. Analysis criteria of research method, creativity, creativity education was established by precedent study and literature review on creativity.
Conclusions of analysis are as follows.
First, creativity research in education a has been actively undertaken during the past decade. As methods of study, literature review and quantitative research are most used, on the other hand, qualitative research and mixed research are shown to be less but have tendency to increase gradually. In regard of subjects of research, over half of the entire research, dealt with elementary students. In comparison, little portion is occupied by middle and high school students.
Second, how to approach creativity was analyzed by definition, focus, and level. It shows that studies with a definition of creativity are more than without it but the former has been decreasing and the latter increasing little by little. Studies which focus on person, cognitive or emotional characteristics, are the most. And process, environment, and product follow. Regarding the level of creativity research in education, most was done on little-c creativity level, on the other hand, studies which identify the creativity in educational context showed little. Studies having an interest in mini-c creativity level were hardly found.
Third, this study analyzes toward creativity education by three dimensions. Results shows ‘creativity education integrated with subject’ is ranked top as most implemented and ‘direct creativity education separated from subject’, which is done during extra curricular hour, is followed. ‘ Indirect support for creativity education’ including study on theory, policy, teacher, and environment as least done. Among ‘direct creativity education separated from subject’, the largest portion goes to education through particular creativity education program followed by direct teaching of creative thinking skills. In contrast, creativity education through field trip takes little. Among ‘creativity education integrated with subject’, the ranks are as follows; 1) integrative education with contents of subject and creativity 2) education which applied principles and teaching aids to promote creativity 3) particular practice which emerges creativity 4) education which used creative thinking skills. Among ‘ indirect support for creativity education’, over the half is about theory of creativity and around 20 % is research about policy and teacher. The finding shows only one for research of classroom environment and nothing for research of home environment.
From above results, the following recommendations to creativity research in education and the field of creativity education are suggested.
First, the qualitative research at actual school setting need to be done more. And some efforts needed to get higher reliability, triangulation. Moreover, subjects of research should be extended beyond only elementary students to middle and high school students.
Second, researchers should identify the perspectives of definition, focus and level to creativity. And focus of creativity definition should be undertaken not only in the aspects of cognitive but also in emotional, integral, and domain-specific aspects. On top of that, it is necessary to focus on integrated creativity should be increased and researcher should identify the concept of creativity which he(she) based on. And Conceptualization of level of creativity in the context of education is necessary and field research on mini-c creativity should be conducted more frequently.
Third, research which intend to analyzes the present conditions of creativity education integrated with subject. Additionally, more study should be done on other subjects not just such as mathematics, science, and practical arts and on a creativity field trip on which students can go outside of their schools.