Types of Creativity and Visualization in Teams of Different Educational Specialization

Abstract

This research is the first to examine different types of creativity dimensions in relation to different types of visualization on a team level, by comparing adolescences’ teams of different specialization (visual artist, scientists, and humanities) during a complex creative task in an ecologically valid educational setting First, the difference between all teams’ creative outputs (drawings) was compared in terms of their visual characteristics and represented content based on parameters derived from the content analysis of visual media. Second, the teams’ creative performance was compared using evaluations of experts from different professional domains. Based on the evidence from examination of teams’ creative products (final drawings) and their evaluations by professionals, this research suggests that object visualization is related to artistic creativity and spatial visualization is related to scientific creativity on the team-level. Furthermore, the findings provide a clear indication that assessing general creativity independently of the domain, as it has been done so far in most team creativity literature, might be somewhat limited.

Notes

¹ Most children from multidisciplinary schools focused on one particular specialization. In Group 13, there were 6 students with specialization in science and 1 student with specialization in visual art. In Group 14, there were 4 students with specialization s in science and 2 students with specialization in humanities. In Group 15, there were 3 students with specialization in science, 2 students with specialization in humanities, and 1 student with specialization in visual art. In Group 16, there were 2 students with specialization in science, 2 students with specialization in visual art, 2 with specialization in humanities, and 1 student with mixed specialization in science and art.

² Forty-five min is the typical length of a lesson in Russian schools.