The Development of Creativity: From Self-to Socially-Referenced

How does creativity develop from a nearly ubiquitous and domain-general capacity associated with playfulness and openness to experience to a highly rarified and domain-specific ability associated with invention and innovation? In this short report, I describe creativity along two dimensions: self- and socially referenced creativity. In self-referenced creativity, only the creators themselves judge the novelty and usefulness of an idea, while in socially referenced creativity, others make the judgments. For education to support creativity, it should therefore leverage (not squash) the self-referenced creativity that learners enter schooling with, while simultaneously supporting learners in a transition to more socially referenced creativity within a domain. Based on the psychological characteristics of learners at different points in their academic development, I suggest activities that would be maximally fruitful in the process of developing domain creativity. Because these activities allow learners to engage their self-referenced creativity but also require them to apply their domain knowledge to predict what others in the domain would view as novel or useful, they support the development of socially referenced creativity and exemplify the goals of creative education.