Creativity in the Here and Now: A Generic, Micro-Developmental Measure of Creativity

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Cognitive Science
• Educational Psychology

Background:

• Creativity assessment methods often focus on the person or product, neglecting the dynamic creative process.
• Existing research on creative processes is largely qualitative, context-specific, and difficult to generalize.
• There is a need for systematic, micro-level measures of the creative process to inform interventions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce and describe a newly developed, systematic, and generic coding frame for assessing the creative process.
• To demonstrate the versatility of the coding frame across different creative tasks and contexts.
• To explore advanced analytical methods for micro-level intra-individual creativity data.

Main Methods:

• Development of a novel coding frame for micro-level assessment of creative processes.
• The coding frame assesses novelty and appropriateness on a 4-point ordinal scale at discrete moments.
• Application of the coding frame to a musical composition task and a scientific reasoning task.
• Utilized time series analysis and state space grids for analyzing dense intra-individual measurements.

Main Results:

• The developed coding frame provides a systematic, generic measure applicable to diverse creative processes.
• The instrument successfully captured the micro-level dynamics of novelty and appropriateness in different tasks.
• Demonstrated the feasibility of advanced data analysis techniques for intra-individual creativity.

Conclusions:

• The new coding frame offers a valuable tool for understanding and potentially stimulating the creative process.
• This micro-level, intra-individual assessment approach moves beyond traditional person- or product-focused measures.
• Further research is needed to fully validate the instrument and its analytical applications.