Teachers' beliefs about children creativity and its development in education

Abstract

The paper presents an overview of scientific publications devoted to the research of teachers’ beliefs about finding and promoting creativity of primary school children in the classroom. The empirical study is aimed to investigate the relations of the objective and subjective indicators of creativity and their interrelationship with intellectual abilities, motivation, and personality characteristics in 240 students of the first and third grades of Moscow gymnasiums. According to the results, teachers' ratings of intelligence and creativity significantly positively correlate with each other in both ages, whereas the correlation between test-scores of intellectual and creative abilities was not found. Teachers' ratings of children creativity also do not correspond to the test-scores and self-estimates of creativity, because the teachers mostly orientate towards intellectual abilities and work organization skills of the children. Self-estimates of creativity positively correlate with achievement motivation, cognitive motivation and test-scores of originality. The obtained results demonstrate the need to integrate different subjective and objective information in order to value such a multifaceted phenomenon as children creativity.