Redefining learning for students: A challenging but creative process

In preparing to write this blog post about the relationship between strategic learning and creativity, I informally polled my research assistants about their views of creative pursuits. I prompted them to name the first creative hobby/profession that came to mind. Now, you might suspect that they named pursuits like art, graphic design, and writing—and you would be right. That was unsurprising.

What was also unsurprising to me (though perhaps a bit disappointing), was that not a single one of them said that learning was a creative pursuit. This is despite the fact that they are research assistants in my lab, where we frequently discuss how learning is a creative process! Unfortunately, students often reduce their conception of learning to the actions of reading textbooks, completing assignments, and studying for exams, which are not typically considered as creative behavior.

Perhaps students don’t think of their learning as creative due to the way creativity is discussed in everyday life. Most definitions of creativity—though incredibly varied—involve producing things (i.e., ideas, products) that are both novel and applicable to the current situation (sometimes classified as “useful”). Because the ideas and products that get identified as creative are recognized by the broader public and bring recognition to the person behind them, lay people tend to equate creativity with this recognition, and ignore the smaller acts of creativity that define our daily lives.

Figure adapted from Kaufman & Beghetto (2009). The learning examples on the right track show how creativity relates to every step of the research process (because research involves learning the answers to novel questions!). What other examples can you think of?

Learning is a creative process

But there is another method of characterizing creativity—the “Four-C” model (shown in figure above), proposed by Kaufman and Beghetto in 2009. This model does identify and include the “Big-C” creativity that encompasses works of art like Starry Night and famous television shows like Breaking Bad. However, the framework also includes “little-c” creativity, which refers to the everyday innovations that characterize our lives. For example, if I drop a remote control behind the couch, I need to devise a way to reach it. Using something long like a broom handle to get it is hardly a novel invention worthy of praise—many people have likely done the same thing before. However, this solution may be novel to me. I’ve used my knowledge to creatively solve an everyday type of problem. Another example of little-c creativity is forming together words to create a never-before-written blog post! Finally, this model also refers to “mini-c” creativity, which is the type of creativity that characterizes the ways in which we make novel connections between ideas for ourselves. Sounds an awful lot like what students do when they study and try to make sense of new information, right? It should—mini-c creativity is also referred to as personal, transformative learning!

And yet, many educators and students alike don’t tend to think about the process of learning as particularly creative. There are myriad reasons for this, but I will highlight two. First, students often think of learning as simply accumulating knowledge (i.e., through studying) and repeating that knowledge when prompted (i.e., on an exam). It is no surprise that students may feel this way about learning, given how students are tested in classrooms, with multiple-choice and short answer questions that require only regurgitation of knowledge, rather than assembling that knowledge in a creative way to produce something novel (though it is becoming more common to require students to produce a final creative project in courses, rather than take an exam). But learning is not simply a process of taking knowledge, in pure and unadulterated form, and copying it into one’s brain (though when cramming for an exam, it may feel like this to students!). Rather, learning involves the creative manipulation of knowledge to fit within the schemas of students’ prior knowledge. In many ways, learning is a revision of old knowledge to incorporate new knowledge—students construct their own learning.

Second, creativity is associated with positive emotional states. For example, research on little-c creativity “in the wild” has found that people are more likely to report being engaged in creative acts when they are also feeling happy or positive. But true learning, where we incorporate knowledge into memory for the long-term, is challenging and difficult. It requires effort on the part of the learner. Indeed, recommendations for effective learning have been catchily titled “desirable difficulties,” to emphasize the idea that for effective learning to happen, students need to be challenging themselves in a sort of “Goldilocks” zone of activities that are difficult, but not overly so.

Despite these views of learning as uncreative, basic memory research tells us that learning, memory, and creativity are all inexorably linked. Students (and folks who don’t study memory) may think that learning and remembering something just involves putting a piece of information exactly as-is into mind for later retrieval. And when they need to retrieve a piece of information (as to perform well on an exam), they pull that information out exactly as it was stored, consult it, and then put it back in storage. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. As previously mentioned, learning involves integrating new knowledge with prior knowledge—making connections between new and old in ways that make sense to the learner. And even the process of remembering information involves creative construction. We do not remember things exactly as they happened—we update those memories every time we retrieve them. New information is added based on the current context, and the memory is altered based on the new knowledge a person has at the time they are recalling the memory, compared to the knowledge they had when they learned it! In this way, memory is actually an active and constructive process that involves recreating what the information was likely to have been like, rather than exactly as it was. Similarly, imagining how future events might happen, like imagining how well one will do on an exam—an ability called episodic future thinking—is a constructive process that relies on the same memory system as does recalling old information. Our entire memory system is built to be creative! I have previously argued—drawing on Schacter’s (1999) work on the “seven sins of memory”—that the human memory system is, in fact, designed with its inherent flaws in order to facilitate our ability to be creative and solve problems when we encounter them.

To return to the desirable difficulties discussed earlier, such practices include interleaving study topics, spacing out studying sessions (as opposed to cramming), and testing oneself instead of passively studying—known as the testing effect. These strategic learning techniques are more effective at promoting learning than students’ typical study techniques (e.g., rereading the textbook) precisely because they capitalize on the fact that memory is an inherently creative and associative process. For example, interleaving purposefully juxtaposes information so that similarities and differences are easier to identify, which can lead to those insight moments of understanding the topics at hand. Spacing out study sessions takes advantage of the fact that we are different people at different points in time, so encountering the information we are trying to learn in many different contexts helps create connections with new and different information, thereby strengthening those connections and helping us remember information in the long term, regardless of where we may be when we need that information.

Even with all of the empirical evidence documenting effective teaching practices to promote long-term learning and the connection between memory and creativity, students don’t use these techniques as often as they should. How can we get them to do so?

Finding joy in the struggle: Learning from mistakes

Unfortunately, I don’t have all of the answers. But the first step might be to acknowledge that true learning requires a bit of challenge and struggle. A great story I use with my students is an example from one of my graduate mentors: If you’ve ever been around a baby learning to walk (a huge challenge for them!) and watched them toddle around and then fall over, what did you do? Did you punish them for failing to do the task correctly? Or did you clap enthusiastically and tell the baby, “Great job, try again!” until they got it, and everyone was overjoyed? I hope it’s the latter.

Yet, students lose such a joyous connection with learning because of the way in which mistakes and challenges in learning are addressed in school. Because mistakes (on exams, essays, assignments, etc.) are coupled with taking points away, struggling and getting things incorrect becomes something to be avoided, not celebrated. But true learning—a creative process—involves a bit of challenge and struggle. And while the process may be a little bit painful, the feeling of accomplishment when learning something and applying that knowledge appropriately to a new task is amazing. Try to think of ways in which you might help reward such learning mistakes to support students and keep them motivated through the learning roadblocks when they encounter them.

In sum, we as instructors might consider changing the way we talk about learning with our students. Acknowledge that it’s hard, and it’s difficult. But it’s hard and difficult because it’s not meant to just regurgitate knowledge—it’s a creative act! Thus, studying techniques should capitalize on the way the memory system was designed to work—creating novel associations to produce new insights.