Metacognition Boosting Creativity

Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #29

Hello :) Last time I wrote about how memory and creativity are more closely linked than many people might assume. I also touched on the role of metacognition in creativity, which is the focus this week.

To briefly summarise, memory plays a role in creativity because having a store of knowledge and the ability to use it flexibly – to transfer it – is vital to creative thinking.

One reader kindly got in touch last week to point out that where I spoke about creative thinking, you could just as easily insert ‘critical thinking’. True! The principles are very similar. Often assumed to be transferable skills, each is in fact very hard to transfer from one context to another.

For example, it’s not as if you could train someone to just be a super-creative, and then from that point onwards they would be amazing at poetry, at coming up with new science theories, at developing advertising campaigns, etc.

This is because you need to have the building blocks – a good level of relevant and knowledge and skills – to come up with creative ideas.

But What About ‘STEAM’?

You might wonder about how the points above link to STEAM concept. This is where people add an A for ‘arts’ to the more familiar STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). The idea being, as I understand it, to make trainee scientists more creative, and more ready to contribute to our future society.

Do I agree? Well, to me, it depends on how this is done…

If, as suggested in an article for The Conversation, it means that science education should involve inquiry, that’s fine. Such an approach could encourage curiosity and problem solving. I don’t think that these things were ever inherently just part of the Arts in the first place (science has always advanced via inquiry!), but I don’t mind if that’s the acronym that people want to go with.

What is less likely to help is just inserting unrelated ‘creative’ tasks, for example getting students to do a visual arts workshop, or listen to Mozart while they study. As mentioned last week, such approaches reflects the misconception that creativity only applies to arts subjects. More importantly, any creative skills that might somehow be developed through these activities are unlikely to transfer to STEM tasks. Such ‘far transfer’ of learning is notoriously hard to achieve.

All in all, arts activities might sometimes be fun and relaxing for students – a good break, even – but they’re unlikely to make them more creative as scientists.

What Can Transfer?

There are some things that can transfer, however – specific creative strategies and techniques that are broadly applicable to different problems, as well as some of the way we organise our own learning.

For example, if students come to understand strategies to generate ideas, or the benefits of incubation, these could potentially be applied to multiple creative problems.

And it will greatly help if these are recognised and understood on a metacognitive level, so that learners know about the strategies and realise that they are widely applicable.

Such strategies are unlikely to develop spontaneously. They will usually require instruction, or at least a teacher or mentor pointing them out as they happen.

In short, metacognitive knowledge of creative processes and of one’s own thinking (i.e. our self-knowledge) are better approaches than immersing learners in the arts and keeping our fingers crossed that creativity will magically transfer to other disciplines without further intervention.

Specific Strategies

Let’s dive a little deeper into some of the strategies and approaches that might help:

1. Firstly, learners need to recognise that creativity is not a gift that some people have and that others don’t. They may see themselves as not creative, perhaps because they haven’t excelled in art or music. Educators can work to tackle this misconception.

2. Linked to the above, learners need to understand that effective creativity requires them to put some work in advance. Preparation for creative thinking can involve learning more about the relevant field, and developing key skills. Again, creativity can’t happen without knowledge.

3. Fluency of ideas is recognised as a key aspect of creativity in the classic Torrance test. That is, the more ideas, the better. Again, learners need to know this! They can be encouraged to take techniques like brainstorming seriously, and to use them throughout a creative process, not just at the start. I discuss idea generation more in this blog post (free to access).

4. Incubation is the idea that certain delays can lead to creative breakthroughs. As with the spacing effect, there is probably a sweet spot: some forgetting can help, but not too much. Learners can be encouraged to strategically pause and focus on side tasks, scheduling in further creative sessions after a period of hours or days.

5. Staying motivated is often difficult in education, and not least in creative or problem solving tasks where learners feel stuck. Tools to stay motivated can therefore help with people’s creative output, and can be encouraged by encouraging a sense of low-stakes playfulness in terms of the outcome of a creative challenge.

6. Strangely enough, randomness can often help creativity. If learners recognise this, they can build this into their process. Solutions and ideas are often less about something new, and more about putting learned information together in new ways.

The following research article demonstrates the benefit of random recombinations via three experiments:

Kim & Zhong (2017): Ideas rise from chaos: Information structure and creativity. (Open Access).

That’s it for today. I hope it helps! If there are particular ideas or strategies that you’d like to hear more about, just let me know, and I can focus on them in a future newsletter.

If, like me, you live in one of the colder parts of the world, it has been nice to see some signs of spring. I saw thousands of snowdrops when my wife and I were walking the dog recently.

All the best,

Jonathan

Before you go… a final reminder that I am running a Zoom session on study skills on Monday 6 Feb 2023, 16:00–17:30 UK time. It can be found on my university’s website here.

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Last week: Creativity: What’s the Role of Memory?

Website: www.jonathanfirth.co.uk