Myths about creativity: A qualitative study on gifted students' parents

Abstract

Giftedness and creativity have been popular research areas especially in the last century. Moreover, giftedness and creativity are interrelated concepts. Although many researchers study different aspects of these two concepts, there are not consensuses on their definitions. Gifted individuals are defined as those who have above-average ability, creativity, and task commitment and combine these three traits and apply these to one or more domains. The inventions and products of the gifted individuals are results of their creativity. Parents of gifted students play a significant role in fostering creativity of their children. Unless the gifted children are given the opportunity to use their creativity, their abilities to discover new things will not be appeared. Although creativity is a significant trait, there are still some myths that are unrealistic opinions about creativity. This qualitative research aims to determine the myths of parents of gifted students about creativity. The data was collected by semi-structured interviews with 12 volunteer parents of gifted students. In order to analyze the qualitative data obtained from the interviews, content analysis was conducted. In the content analysis, data similar to each other are organized by bringing together under themes and data is interpreted. After analyzing the content codes, four themes emerged as: (1) definition of creativity; (2) characteristics of creative people; (3) thinking patterns of creative people; (4) motivation of creative people. The results reveal that myths about creativity are common among parents of gifted students. Believing that creativity is a divine inspiration, linking creativity with personality, thinking that creative people like to take risk and believing that there is a positive relationship between intelligence and creativity are some examples to the common myths about creativity.

Keywords

• giftedness
• myths
• fostering creativity
• parent

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