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It presents guidance on creating and assessing divergent thinking activities for teacher candidates, enabling future educators to meet 21st-century challenges through more exploratory and relevant learning.",{"@graph":14,"@context":73},[15,34,56],{"@type":16,"itemListElement":17},"BreadcrumbList",[18,23,27,31],{"item":19,"name":20,"@type":21,"position":22},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",1,{"item":24,"name":25,"@type":21,"position":26},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/","Document",2,{"item":28,"name":29,"@type":21,"position":30},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/","Research & 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Learning Activities that Enhance Young Adolescent Creativity  \nJason T. Hilton  \nSlippery Rock University  \nAs social and academic forces begin to collide for young adolescents at the beginning of the middle level experience, students experience an unfortunate drop in their creativity. Appropriately trained middle level teachers have the potential to lessen this problem through the use of carully selected open-ended learning activities that increase the divergent thinking capacities of their students. This article argues for the use of divergent thinking activities in the teaching ofyoung adolescents and discusses both their creation and their assessment in an effort to allow future middle level educators to respond to 21st century challenges.  \nFor young adolescents in middle level settings, quality learning should include exposure to challenging classroom activities that force them to engage in more meaningful problem solving and creative enterprises. Unfortunately, as a consequence of high stakes testing, a return to traditional means of instruction, which often focuses on convergent thinking tasks, seems to largely limit students to activities designed to increase knowledge, understanding and application. While these are certainly important as foundational elements of learning, for students to reach higher, they need to analyze, evaluate and – ultimately – create, requiring a different type of learning. Middle level teachers can incorporate divergent thinking tasks into their lessons to disrupt this heavy reliance on learning oriented toward convergent thinking. Educating teacher candidates in middle level programs about divergent thinking as well as how to craft and assess appropriate divergent thinking activities ensures that future middle level learners will be able to acquire skills that are essential for success in the 21st century. In the age of information, creativity has become more important than ever before (Kwon, Park, & Park, 2006; Lin, 2011; Mishra, 2012) and middle level learners stand to gain the most from exposure to and practice with divergent thinking activities.  \nThe notion of divergent thinking has dominated scholarship on creativity following Guilford’s 1950 presidential address and subsequent article in American Psychologist (Baer, 1998). Divergent thinking is closely linked to creativity and recognized as a powerful tool for later problem solving; however, a substantial decrease in divergent thinking ability occurs in the middle level setting (Claxton, Pannells, & Rhoads, 2005) . Assisting future teachers of middle level learners to better understand divergent thinking and helping them to develop the capacity to craft learning activities that enhance the divergent thinking capabilities of their future students presents an opportunity for middle level teachers and teams to embrace a curriculum that is indeed more challenging,  \nexploratory, integrative, and relevant (Association for Middle Level Education, 2010) .  \nDivergent Thinking  \nFrom both a theoretical and empirical standpoint, discussions of creativity often reference divergent thinking as foundational to the creative process. Divergent thinking was first described by Guilford (1950, 1967) as an act of seeking multiple solutions to a problem without one specific answer, or thinking from multiple perspectives. Over time this definition has remained largely intact, more recently defined by Vincent, Decker & Mumford (2002) as,“the ability to generate multiple alternative problem solutions, [representing] a key capacity underlying creative thought” (p. 163) . While discussions of creativity remain largely theoretical due to challenges associated with measurement of such an attribute (Guilford, 1950), the notion that divergent thinking is the foundational process of creativity is widely accepted (Runco & Acar, 2012; Silvia, et al., ","cbCaiqUgLmJFfsJ4","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaiqUgLmJFfsJ4","pdf",696901,"English","# Teaching Future Middle Level Educators to Craft Learning Activities that Enhance Young Adolescent Creativity\n## Divergent Thinking","[{\"question\":\"Why does the article focus on young adolescents’ creativity in middle level settings?\",\"answer\":\"It describes a drop in creativity as social and academic forces collide at the beginning of the middle level experience and as instruction shifts toward convergent thinking due to high-stakes testing.\"},{\"question\":\"What solution does the article propose for reducing the creativity decline?\",\"answer\":\"It recommends using carfully selected open-ended divergent thinking learning activities that increase students’ divergent thinking capacities and support higher-level learning.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the article define divergent thinking?\",\"answer\":\"It presents divergent thinking as seeking multiple solutions without a single correct answer and as the ability to generate multiple alternative problem solutions underlying creative thought.\"}]","Teaching Future Middle Level Educators to Craft Learning Activities that Enhance Young Adolescent Creativity | PDF",1792089447,13]