Studies Explore How to Nurture Students' Creativity

By Sarah D. Sparks

In the continuing debate about American competitiveness in the global economy, politicians and educators alike have pointed not to students' test scores, but to their creativity and ingenuity, as models for the rest of the world.

Teaching creativity has been a hot-button topic this fall, from the National Academy of Education's annual meeting in Washington to a Learning and the Brain conference in Boston. Yet researchers are just beginning to determine what makes some students more creative than their peers, and how the classroom environment can nurture or smother that ability.

"To study creativity of young people who are on the move, we can't use our established habits," Shirley Brice Heath, an English professor emerita at Stanford University, told members of the education academy at its annual research meeting, which...