The present chapter is concerned with the methods and tools that have been proposed and used to assess creativity in children and adolescents. Creativity across developmental periods is a moving target. The 7 Cs framework highlights the main facets of creativity that have appeared in the literature (Lubart, 2017). These Cs provide a framework for examining creativity assessment in terms of Creators (creative people), Creating (the act of producing new work), Collaborations (interactions with close others during creation), Context (the physical and social environment), Creation (the new production and its characteristics), Consumption (the uptake and adoption of creative work), and Curricula (teaching and developing creativity through education).

Creativity – the ability to generate original productions that are meaningful in their context – is a culturally embedded phenomenon. It may involve a person or a group of people who create. The cultural context in which the creative act occurs (with its physical and social facets) has many levels, ranging from the family, school, and work-organizational settings to local community, regional, national, or transnational ones. Culture, as a social environment, can be defined as “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings visible and tangible in symbols. A system of conceptions is inherited and expressed in symbolic forms. These forms are the means by which men and women (or human beings) communicate, continue their culture, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life” (Geertz, 1973, p. 89). In the GLOBE international research program, House and Javidan (2004, p. 15) defined culture as “shared motives, values, beliefs, identities, and interpretations or meanings of significant events that result from common experiences of members of collectives and are transmitted across age generations.”

We here explore possible links between reasoning and creativity. Creativity has sometimes been described as a blind search with retention of fortuitous “good” ideas, as a “freewheeling” mental activity, as “thinking outside the box” and as the result of “primary processes” that are intuitive. Creativity is often contrasted with adaptive step-by-step processing, controlled thought, logic and prototypical “reasoning” behavior. However, is this dichotomy a reasonable picture of the way things work, or rather a caricature that hides some deep links between reasoning and creativity? First, the relationship between the development of logical thought and creative thinking in children is examined. Then connections between creativity and formal and postformal reasoning, in particular dialectical thinking, are studied. Finally, implications and conclusions are drawn.

In this chapter, we consider reasoning, in general, as the act of thinking based on inductive and deductive processes. It is often associated, more specifically, with the process of developing and supporting assertions, claims, proposals or conclusions from facts or premises, based on a set of arguments (Reber, 1995). Reasoning, in many cases, provides the basis for action or decisions. The development of reasoning is often viewed as an important educational goal.

Creativity, in contrast, can be defined as the capacity to produce novel, original work that fits with task constraints (Lubart, 1994). Work refers to all types of ideas and productions. This work must be novel in the sense that it goes beyond a replication or copy of that which exists. The extent to which the work produced is novel can vary from being original only for the person who completed the work (this is the notion of reinventing ideas known already in the larger social context) to being original for a limited social group, to being original for all of humanity. The second component in the definition concerns the fit with constraints. We distinguish creative ideas from bizarre ideas, which are also novel, because creative ideas take into account the parameters of a situation, the constraints. Novel productions that are in some way “useful”, or “worthwhile”, in a given context are, thus, creative.

In the following sections the links between reasoning and creativity are examined.

Once upon a time there was a young child named Alice who wanted to become a writer. Inspired by numerous children's books and the imaginative tales that these books told, Alice dreamed of a literary career. One day at school, Alice's teacher proposed an exciting task for a young author: Each student had to invent a short story, write the text, and then read it aloud to the class. Alice was delighted, but when she got home and started to work on the assignment she realized that the teacher had never indicated how to proceed. There were no clear instructions on how to write a story, how to generate ideas, or how to put them together. This assignment was quite different from most schoolwork, such as solving math problems, because normally the teacher showed students how to proceed by giving examples and working through a sample problem while specifying the method to use at each step. Schoolwork, in general, was similar to making a cake: The teacher provided the ingredients, there were instructions about how to put them together, and everyone was supposed to end up, more or less, with the same cake. Apparently writing a story was quite different. Students were supposed to find their own ingredients, decide how to put them together in their own way, and end up with something different from each other.

Alice decided to get started right away with her literary composition.

Reasoning refers, in general, to the act of thinking based on inductive and deductive processes. It is often associated, more specifically, with the process of developing and supporting assertions, claims, proposals, or conclusions (Reber, 1995). It provides, in many cases, the basis for action or decisions. The development of reasoning is often viewed as an important educational goal. In this chapter, we focus on the relation between reasoning and another aspect of cognition that has been gaining increasing attention, namely creativity.

Creativity can be defined as the capacity to produce novel, original work that fits within task constraints (Lubart, 1994). Work refers to all types of ideas and productions. This work must be novel in the sense that it goes beyond a replication or copy of that which exists. The extent to which the work produced is novel can vary from being original only for the person who completed the work (this is the notion of reinventing ideas known already in the larger social context) to being original for a limited social group to being original for all of humanity. The second component in the definition concerns the fit with constraints. We distinguish creative ideas from bizarre ideas, which are also novel, because creative ideas take into account the parameters of a situation, the constraints. Novel productions that are in some way “useful” or “reasonable” in a given context are, thus, creative.

We explore possible links between the development of reasoning and the development of creativity in children and adults.

A summary of past and present research on creativity in France and Romande (French-speaking) Switzerland is proposed in this chapter. This task is difficult, however, because of the cultural diversity of France and Romande Switzerland. Historically, this region has long been a European crossroad for ideas and scientific knowledge. In the field of psychology, only a quick glance at its development reveals the depth and breadth of other cultures' influence, such as the nineteenth-century British empiricist and German experimental approaches, as well as positions of major psychologists such as Freud or James on the nature of the mind. We thus seek to isolate the specific contributions of researchers in France and Romande Switzerland in the understanding of creativity.

We primarily organize our review in a chronological fashion. In the first part, we discuss the writings of early thinkers and researchers, followed by theories exposed at the turn of the nineteenth-century, together with an examination of early empirical contributions. Then, between the two world wars, it seems that studying creativity became less of an issue for psychologists in France and Romande Switzerland, as the field concentrated on more graspable constructs. In the meantime, however, local experiments in the field of education led to the development of various tools and teaching methods that promoted creativity in children. After the Second World War, interest in creativity gained some momentum in France and Romande Switzerland as in many other geographical areas.

Many problems can be solved by accessing stored knowledge or by applying pre-established, “algorithmic” procedures to reach a solution. Such problems are the bread and butter of problem solving; from kindergarten to the university, students accumulate a great deal of experience with these “canned” problems. Difficulties arise, however, when people need to solve problems that do not fit the mold, that require some innovative thinking. Guilford (1967) proposed that “real” problem solving involved actively seeking, constructing new ideas that fit with constraints imposed by a task or more generally by the environment. In other words, in most instances “real” problem solving involves creative thinking (see Mayer, 1983). One well-known example of an unpredictable yet vital problem that was solved successfully is illustrated by the epic return flight of the Apollo 13 space mission (King, 1997). Preserving the lives of the crew members required a cascade of operations, each involving creative thinking, as the explosion of the ship's main oxygen supply was not the kind of problem that the flight crew expected to encounter, and thus they had no specific training, no preestablished procedure to follow.

NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION

The world in which we live can be characterized as a rapidly evolving, technology- and information-oriented one in which creative problem solving skills are increasingly valued (Sternberg & Lubart, 1996).

If one wanted to select the best novelist, artist, entrepreneur, or even chief executive officer, one would most likely want someone who is creative. Indeed, today many CEOs are selected not for their pleasant personalities (it's hard to be perceived as pleasant when you may have to fire 20% of the company) or their learning and memory skills (they use computers or subordinates to remember the details for them), but for their creative vision of how to turn a company around.

Creativity is the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e., original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e., useful, adaptive concerning task constraints) (Lubart, 1994; Ochse, 1990; Sternberg, 1988a; Sternberg & Lubart, 1991, 1995, 1996). Creativity is a topic of wide scope that is important at both the individual and societal levels for a wide range of task domains. At an individual level, creativity is relevant, for example, when one is solving problems on the job and in daily life. At a societal level, creativity can lead to new scientific findings, new movements in art, new inventions, and new social programs. The economic importance of creativity is clear because new products or services create jobs. Furthermore, individuals, organizations, and societies must adapt existing resources to changing task demands to remain competitive.

Creativity does not occur in a vacuum. When we examine a creative person, creative product, or creative process, we often ignore the environmental milieu. We decontextualize creativity. The environment, however, is always present and can have a profound effect on creative expression. The environment may be involved in stimulating and supporting creativity as well as defining and evaluating it.

In this vein, recent theories have acknowledged that a confluence of environment centered variables and person-centered variables (intelligence, knowledge, cognitive styles, personality, and motivation) is necessary for creativity (Amabile, 1983; Arieti, 1976; Csikszentmihalyi, 1988; Gruber, 1989; Sternberg & Lubart, 1991, 1995). Concerning the environment, we can identify a set of interrelated contexts that influence creativity. These include the physical setting, the family, the school or workplace, the field of endeavor, and the culture. This chapter focuses on the effect of the cultural environment on creativity.

Culture refers to a shared system of cognitions, behaviors, customs, values, rules, and symbols concerning the manner in which a set of people interact with their social and physical environment (Reber, 1985; Triandis, 1996). Culture is learned and socially transmitted from generation to generation. Cultural groups are often identified at the societal level, following geopolitical boundaries. Within these cultural groups there may be identifiable subcultures based on age (e.g., teen culture), socioeconomic class, religion, or other characteristics.