We are proud to announce that Instructor Sarah Wong, who is concurrently a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Psychology, was recently invited to deliver a research talk, “Dispelling the Creativity Myth: Insights from Cognitive Science”, at the inaugural Lunchtime Seminar Series hosted by the FASS Research Division on 10 October 2019.
At her talk, Ms. Wong discussed challenges related to defining and assessing “creativity” as a multi-dimensional construct, and presented findings from her empirical research showing that young children’s music compositional creativity can be boosted through the use of mental imagery. This work has been published in the journal PLoS ONE.
Drawing on her other recently published research on errors and higher-order learning outcomes, Ms. Wong also shared how strategies informed by the cognitive science of learning can be broadly applied to enhance education. She commented,
As a researcher and educator, it’s exciting to be able to seamlessly integrate both practices through educational psychology. By challenging assumptions that we hold about learning, such as the notion that creativity is reserved only for “geniuses”, scientific research has great potential to inform evidence-based pedagogical methods and, ultimately, positively shape contemporary higher education.”
Congratulations to Ms. Wong on her successful invited talk!
More details of the event are available below and at the FASS Research Division’s Facebook page.
Abstract
A popular myth about creativity is that it is an innate ability reserved only for eminent geniuses such as Mozart, Picasso, and Einstein. However, psychological studies have found that creativity can in fact be developed in ordinary individuals through applying the cognitive science of learning. Drawing on my research, I present evidence that the use of mental imagery enhances young children’s creativity in composing music, and discuss broader implications for education.
References
Wong, S. S. H., & Lim, S. W. H. (in press). From JOLs to JOLs+: Directing learners’ attention in retrieval practice to boost integrative argumentation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000225
Wong, S. S. H., & Lim, S. W. H. (2019). Prevention–Permission–Promotion: A review of approaches to errors in learning. Educational Psychologist, 54, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2018.1501693
Wong, S. S. H., & Lim, S. W. H. (2017). Mental imagery boosts music compositional creativity. PLoS ONE, 12:e0174009. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0174009
Photos courtesy of Wendy Tan, FASS Research Division.
