Abstracts - Earli

F 729 August 2007 17:00 - 18:20Room: 0.100APaper SessionCreativityChair:Johannes Hans Van Luit, Langeveld Institute, NetherlandsCreativity in crisis: Fixation in secondary school students (aged 11-16 years) Design &Technology workRos McLellan, University of Cambridge, United KingdomBill Nicholl, University of Cambridge, United KingdomDesign & Technology (D&T) educators in the UK face a ‘crisis in creativity’: design skills (thegeneration and development of design ideas) are poor relative to making skills (manipulation ofmaterials such as wood), resulting in outcomes lacking creativity. Little research has examined theprocess(es) through which students generate design ideas and the role played by teachers in this,but unless this is understood we will be unable to develop creative potentials for learning in D&T.Drawing on the creative cognition literature, (cognitive processes involved in idea generation), wetake the concept of ‘fixation’ (the difficulty in generating novel ideas, due to imagination being‘structured’ by pre-existing knowledge) and apply this to design ideas generated by students (aged11-16 years) in D&T; asking: (1) How does fixation manifest in students’ D&T work, and (2)What teacher practices contribute to fixation. Data were gathered in 6 secondary schools over anine-month period during the preliminary phase of a research and intervention project. Semistructuredinterviews were conducted individually with D&T teachers (N=14), and with focusgroups of students aged 11-16 (N=126). Lessons were observed (N=10), and samples of studentwork and relevant documents were gathered and analysed. Fixation was rife. Typical design ideaswere ‘stereotypically’ similar to each other, based on images from popular culture. Students had astrong desire to make the first design they thought of and often struggled to produce more than onedesign idea. A number of teacher practises contributed to fixation, including strategies related toanalysing products, the presentation of design briefs and socio-cultural dimensions of theclassroom. These can be explained via the effects they have on normative cognitive processes.Fixation is not pre-determined and default tendencies can be overridden through appropriatestimulation. Hence we argue the role of the teacher is key.Creativity, problem solving and feeling: Enhancing potential for learningCarol Aldous, Flinders University of South Australia, AustraliaLearning in its fullest sense involves individuals engaging with fresh challenge, solving novelproblems and developing new ideas. But how are new ideas created? From where do they arise?Such questions are central to research in creativity and fundamental to conceptions of learning.Attending, not only to cognitive processes but also to non-cognitive ones such as feeling andintuition when solving novel problems in mathematics, is pointing to a way in which answers tosuch questions may be found and the potential for learning increased. A study of 405 middleschool students solving two novel problems in the Mathematics Challenge for Young Australians,found that individuals using a feeling or free- flowing approach to reasoning were more likely tobe successful in reaching a solution than those who did not. Feeling cognitions were found to haveboth a direct and indirect effect on the generation of a solution depending on whether mainly– 329 –