Creativity and its Dimensions
Creativity is a complex term and embraces many aspects. It is a process of interacting with the organism to bring out desired learning outcome, ability to generate novel ideas spontaneously, adapting to situations, using the immediate environment for effective communication.
Following are some of the views and definitions given by pioneers in the field.
(a) Creativity is a mental process whereby an individual produces something uniquely new to himself.
(b) Creativity is a capacity, which leads to innovations in various fields of knowledge. It can be considered a way of life.
© “Creativity is the process of sensing gaps and discovering missing elements, forming hypotheses or ideas concerning them, testing these hypotheses and communicating their results.”- Dr.E.P.Torrence (1960) ,
(d) Creativity ia a problem-solving activity (Gagne)
(e) Creativity is a capacity in persons to produce composition.(Drevdhal )
(f) Creativity is the capacity of the individual to avoid the usual routine conventional way of thinking and doing things and producing a quantity of ideas, which are original, novel and which are workable. - Peers, Damular and Quackirbush (1960).
The above stated views and definitions imply that 'Creativity' is:
(a) A Mental ability consisting of many component abilities
(b) A Capacity to do a thing or produce something of a particular nature
(c) A Subjective experience or process having special characteristics.
Every psychological concept can be analyzed or understood based on its dimensions. The concept of creativity can best be explained clearly with the help of its dimensions. Psychologists have addressed more than two dozen of such dimensions viz., Fluency, Originality, Flexibility, Elaboration, Divergent Thinking, Convergent Thinking, Novelty, Ability to produce greater and total number of ideas, uniqueness, usefulness, independent in judgment, resourceful, independent in thought and action etc.However, to measure Creativity ,three dimensions namely, Fluency, Originality, and Flexibility are taken into account.
‘Fluency’ of thinking is an important aspect of creativity, as it deals with fertility of ideas.It is the ability to produce ideas to fulfill certain requirements in a limited time.
Originality, another dimension of creativity deals with unusual or uniqueness of responses, that the person involved , is endowed with.
The third dimension of creativity is 'Flexibility'. Flexibility is doing away with stereotyped ways of thinking and striking out new directions.
Since creativity is a psychological construct, measurement of it involves psychometric principles. Its measurement is based on the principles of quantifying the quality.According to Guilford ,creativity can best be measured with the help of rating scales.