College Creativity

College Creativity in Context

Theresa Amabile encouraged creativity researchers to go beyond the assumption that individual creativity depends primarily on talent and to consider environmental influences on creative production. Her componential model of creativity, which proposes three major components of creativity—skills specific to the task domain, general creativity-relevant skills, and task motivation—provides a useful way to conceptualize the importance of the college environment for creativity. College departments offer domain-specific educational programs for mastery of knowledge and skills that are required for entry into specific fields. In a groundbreaking examination of creative people, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied 100 adults who had produced works that were publicly acknowledged as creative and who had all affected their culture in some important way. In this study of scientists, artists, writers, educators, politicians and social activists, engineers, and religious leaders, he found that the first and foremost characteristic of creative adults is this mastery of a domain of knowledge or skill. Without it, diverse thinking or ideational fluency are not likely to lead to creative products. These profoundly curious and self-guided individuals had little good to say about their educations prior to college. In college and advanced training, however, they found a match between their interests and those of others, in mentors and significant teachers who provided the knowledge they desired so intensely.

The second component is creativity-relevant skills, which are those skills that contribute to creative performance across domains, such as divergent thinking, imagination, and ideational fluency. Programming specifically designed for talented college students often is housed in honors programs via [Page 161]honors colleges. Honors colleges offer opportunities to develop critical thinking skills and domain-specific knowledge at an accelerated rate appropriate for highly creative students. The final component is intrinsic task motivation, the component most influenced by social environment. Research shows that college students who feel rewarded by the creative process itself are more likely to continue creating than those who create in order to receive external rewards.

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