Nick Moore: Annotations

Works Cited:
Vernon, Philip E. "PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES OF CREATIVITY* - Vernon - 2006 – Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry." Wiley Online Library. 7 Dec. 2006. Web. 18 Apr. 2011.

This piece, written by Philip E. Vernon, conveys the difficulty of testing for creativity in both children and adults. Creativity tests can be very inaccurate and unreliable due to countless differing testing formats and scoring rubrics. The author voices his concern that our conventional ways of learning and teaching may be a factor in limiting creativity from an early age in life.
This article, being published in 1967, was written in concern to America and Europe’s ability to keep up in the technological race with the Soviet Union. We now know that the United States has kept up in the race for technology making a main point of the article irrelevant in current times.The purpose of the various and numerous tests given in the article were poorly explained to the reader. Given the time period the article was written and the prominence of these tests during that time period the author relies upon the assumption of the reader having basic knowledge of these tests.

Creativity may be affected just by the way we live our everyday lives. By conforming to repetitive and mundane tasks we are successfully limiting the amount of creativity we generate on a daily basis. Our schooling system, for example, discourages creativity and originality from an early age. We are taught to always rely on adults or superiors to give us the information we need to know and not to generate our own thoughts about the problem presented. This information relates to the boys’ ability to channel their creativity at an early age and not allow society’s repetitive tasks to stunt their creativity.

As a human being we are all capable of being creative and dreaming big from an early age and throughout adulthood. The sources I found all revolve around the central idea of the potential dreams and creativity have to affect one’s life and possibly many other lives.