Editorial

This double issue of Gifted and Talented International focuses on creativity theory and research within the field of gifted education. As editors of the special issue, we were aware of the importance of covering contemporary issues in the field, as well as attempting to address some of the diversity and equity issues that have plagued the area of creativity research and practice in education. In addition, the increasing internationalization of the field encouraged us to include voices from many countries. In this way, we hoped to broaden the opportunities for scholars and practitioners to share theory and research on the topic of creativity in gifted education.

The status of creativity in gifted education

Creativity seems always to have been the poor stepchild of gifted education, and the recognition that the needs of creative students are different from those of other gifted students is seldom acknowledged (Kim, Kaufman, Baer, & Sriraman, 2013). In funding for research, identification of gifted students, and curriculum development, creativity is secondary in importance to academic achievement. In science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) domains, where meta-synthesis of findings in STEM education have shown that challenging STEM education can have a positive effect on creative thinking, little research has followed up on the ways in which this training affects creativity compared to academic achievement (Yildirim, 2016).

Runco and Abdullah (2014) found that in the United States, the National Science Foundation had not funded a single grant on creativity, and the U.S. Department of Education funded only a small number of grant proposals. A later study (Runco, Paek, & Jaeger, 2015) found that only a minority of articles published in creativity journals had been supported by external funds. In Europe, where the development of policy and measures of national innovation have emerged in the last decade, the emphasis has been on importance of creativity for social and economic development and less on creativity in gifted education. Xi Jinping, China's leader, declared creativity to be a national priority, but changing the Asian model of education to incorporate creativity is a long and difficult project (Zhao, 2014).

Although creativity is often included in definitions of giftedness by policymakers across nations and states, selection into gifted education programs at this point depends mainly on teacher nomination and the results of intelligence or achievement tests (Peters, Gentry, Whiting, & McBee, 2019). Creativity assessments in the schools are usually based on checklists and teacher judgment, and only rarely use objective tests such as the Torrance Tests of Creative Creative Thinking (TTCT; Torrance, 1974). Assessment of student products by experts in domains is even rarer, because well-known strategies such as the Consensual Assessment Test (Amabile, 1982) are time-consuming and expensive. In the article “Discovering the Creativity of Written Works: The Keywords Study,” Burak Turkman and Mark Runco investigate a novel approach to judgment of creativity in written works. This approach is based on the identification of specific words and phrases commonly used by creative writers to present novel ideas.

Wherever educational reformers are promoting problem-based education, scholars are racing to create appropriate assessments for creativity in problem-specific situations, but gifted education lags in its use of assessment of creativity in problem-based learning. In this issue of Gifted and Talented International, Hope Wilson and Lucinda Presley developed four rubrics to evaluate creativity in teachers’ lesson plans and students’ products in their article “Assessing Creative Productivity.” Content rubrics cover STEM, arts and humanities, and integration among areas; thinking skills rubrics cover synthesis and transformation, generalization and applications, problem-solving strategies, visual analysis, persistence, and collaboration. A rigorous process involved iterations of content creation for the rubric, expert review, teacher views, and student assessment. As a result, these four rubrics can be used in schools and in research, and thus support researchers and practitioners in the field.

Additionally, most of the scholarship on creativity in the classroom has focused on general creativity training for all students. While creativity training exercises have led to increases in creative thinking, training in divergent thinking tends to have less effectiveness with gifted students than with the general population (Scott, Leritz, & Mumford, 2004). Lisa Bloom, Kristy Doss, Cameron Sastre, and Todd Martin explore this problem in their article here, “The Effects of Models and Instruction on Divergent Thinking.” They compared creations of children receiving explicit instructions and models versus receiving none, finding that open-ended tasks increased the number of novel ideas, yet instructions and models improved performance when tasks required problem-solving.

It makes sense that a focus on training students in general creative thinking skills does little for students who are already highly creative. General creativity training may be less effective than domain-specific training. Nihat Gurel Kahveci and Savaş Akgul in their article “The Relationship Between Mathematical Creativity and Intelligence: A Study on Gifted and General Education Students” report that 5th- to 8th-grade students in special gifted programming score higher in fluency, flexibility, originality, and total creativity in mathematics than students in general education in Turkey, and they advocate for a domain-based approach to identification. Creatively gifted students need instruction in the creative methods of each domain, but if teachers do not have access to creative methods in art, music, technology invention, writing, science, and humanities, it is difficult for them to provide that instruction.

Articles in this issue are good examples of domain-specific approaches to creativity instruction. Um Jamali in “Fostering Creativity Using Robotics Among Gifted Primary Students” evaluated a Lego-based robotics program with gifted girls in which creativity increased after participation in the program. Joseph Kozlowski and Scott Chamberlin in “Raising the Bar for Mathematically Gifted Students Through Creativity-Based Mathematics Instruction” exemplify how classrooms can foster divergent thinking and creative approaches in mathematics in the light of the Five Legs of Creativity theory.

In addition, creative students need specialized career guidance to uncover the “invisible pathways” to creative careers. In their contribution, Ching-Lan Rosaline Lin and Megan Foley Nicpon explore the potential impact of incorporating creativity into career interventions for a population with underserved needs such as twice-exceptional students. They look at the issue through the lens of social-cognitive career theory, which states that knowing oneself and the environment fosters career development. As well, they add a strengths-based vision to focus on each student’s unique combination of potential and challenge. In this way, creativity can serve as a prospect for new interventions that allow for exploration and engagement with the world of work.

There is evidence across cultures that teachers do not see creative students favorably, and often misidentify extraverted, conscientious students as creative rather than those who are less sociable and nonconforming (Kettler, Lamb, Willerson, & Mullet, 2018). Piirto (2011) makes a convincing case that training for creativity must involve attitudes as well as skills, and that teachers themselves need to be open to creativity in their students to teach them effectively. In this issue, Serap Gurak-Ozdemir, Selcuk Acar, Gerard Puccio, and Cory Wright explore the issue of teacher attitudes in their article, “Why Do Teachers Connect Better With Some Students Than Others? Exploring the Influence of Teachers’ Creative-Thinking Preferences.” They found that teachers tend to promote students’ creativity when they have similar preferences themselves, while teachers who favor other qualities tend not to support creative preferences in students, thus emphasizing the importance of positive teacher attitudes to effectively foster creativity.

Biases in creativity scholarship

In addition, scholarship in creativity in education suffers from several biases that have prevented the work from being useful for all creatively gifted students. Diversity and equity remain a problem at the level of creative students served; at the level of inclusion of minorities and women in the literature of creativity as participants and as researchers; and even at the level of the construction of meaning of creativity, creative eminence, and genius. Several observations can be made about the state of research in creativity in education. Simonton (2000, p. 156) said, “Psychologists still have a long way to go before they come anywhere close to understanding creativity in women and minorities. So far, creativity in such groups seems to display a complex pattern of divergence and convergence relative to what has been observed in majority-culture male study participants.” With regard to diversity of creative students served, those countries that have the highest rates of inequality also tend to underserve low-income, non-majority gifted students. Kaufman (2006) made the case that creativity self-report and creativity tests tend to be less culturally biased. More minority students excel in measures of creativity than in measures of academic achievement; therefore, gifted education identification that excludes or minimizes the importance of creativity as a variable may identify fewer minority students. In our article “Personality and Vocational Interests of Creative Adolescents From Racial and Ethnic Minorities” included in this issue, we (Alexandra Vuyk and Barbara Kerr) found that personality and vocational profiles were more similar to other creative individuals without substantial differences by race and ethnicity.

Another aspect of creativity’s diversity and equity problem concerns the construction of “creative eminence” and “genius.” Eisler, Donnelly, and Montuori (2016) said that “the virtual exclusion of women from discourse about creativity has led to a gendered definition of creativity: one that has excluded from the categories of what is ‘creative’ those activities stereotypically associated with women” (p. 3). Definitions of creative eminence are laden with value judgments about the worthiness of some domains of effort compared to others (Kerr, 2013; Proudfoot, Kay, & Koval, 2015). This is true in both the literature of gifted education and the literature of psychology of creativity.

In the early literature, the failure of gifted women to achieve eminence was accepted without question, and the reasons for this failure were simply given as women’s other roles and responsibilities (Terman & Oden, 1935). The concept of eminence has become gendered because it has usually been male researchers deciding what constituted eminence; certain domains of human activity were considered to yield genius, while other domains did not. Male-dominated fields such as physics, architecture, and philosophy are considered to require “genius” (Leslie, Cimpian, Meyer, & Freeland, 2015), while female-dominated fields such a pediatrics, teaching, and textile design do not. Yet creative women who do patent their work do so often in the fields of health, education, and textiles (Milli, Gault, Williams-Baron, Xia, & Berlan, 2016). In addition, when students rate their professors across fields, labels of “genius” and “brilliance” are negatively correlated with minority status as well as female status (Storage, Horne, Cimpian, & Leslie, 2016). The field of gifted education has usually accepted the masculine model of eminence, giving little attention to achievements in female-dominated professions. To understand creative eminence, we must broaden our understanding of what contributions are considered evidence of innovation as well as our understanding of women’s pathways to innovation.

Finally, creativity scholarship itself is part of the problem of underrepresentation of minorities and women. Women and minorities are underrepresented in authorship, citations, and textbook references. In the major journals in which creativity research is published, Creativity Research Journal, Journal of Creative Behavior, and Psychology of Creativity and Esthetics, less than one third of members of the editorial boards are women. Women tend to be cited less frequently than men in the social sciences, possibly because of a tendency of women to engage in 56% less self-citation than men (King, Bergstrom, Correll, Jacquet, & West, 2017), and creativity research seems to follow this pattern. In the textbooks that are used in undergraduate and graduate courses in creativity, a perusal of authors and indices (with authors’ gender determined through Google Scholar Chicago style citations) will show fewer women are cited, ranging from 6%–8% of authors cited (Kerr, 2013). This special issue features the work of several talented and creative women, paying attention to intersectionality as these women come from various cultural backgrounds. Half of our authors for this issue are women, and all authors were encouraged by reviewers to cite fairly, not only by avoiding over-self-citation, but also by considering citing works of women where this was appropriate.

The situation of underrepresentation in creativity scholarship is even worse with regard to cultural minorities. In developed and developing countries, cultural minorities or non-dominant groups have made little progress in participation in the scholarly discourse about creativity in education. In the U.S., few scholars of African American, Latin, or Native American background have written dissertations on creativity; even fewer have published in the field. We hope we have addressed this by encouraging authors from less dominant cultures, but this journal, as well as most journals in our field, has a long way to go. In order for there to be publications by minority scholars, it will be necessary to begin our encouragement of minority researchers at the graduate level to specialize in creativity in education, do dissertations in this area, and pursue positions that allow for writing and research, creating a pipeline to scholarly publication in our field.

The trend toward internationalization of creativity scholarship is promising; however, it is important that non-dominant groups be able to add their voices to our understanding of how an emphasis on creativity can improve the education of gifted students. In this issue, we present a variety of international authors from four continents such as South and North America, Asia, and Europe, representing the countries of Bahrain, Paraguay, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United States. In conclusion, this special issue of Gifted and Talented International on creativity in gifted education was not just an opportunity to present high-quality scholarship on pressing issues in our field, but also an occasion to work toward greater equity and diversity in the research literature.