{"id":3299,"date":"2015-01-29T09:57:52","date_gmt":"2015-01-29T14:57:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/groups.etown.edu\/news\/?p=3299"},"modified":"2015-02-09T18:33:55","modified_gmt":"2015-02-09T23:33:55","slug":"psychology-professors-research-explores-creativity-in-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/2015\/01\/29\/psychology-professors-research-explores-creativity-in-college\/","title":{"rendered":"Psychology Professor\u2019s Research Explores Creativity in College"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"jean-pretz\"Research can have a basic or an applied focus. Dr. Jean Pretz\u2019s creativity research emphasizes both the basic question of \u2018what is creativity?\u2019 and the applied question of \u2018does encouraging students to think critically and creatively help them be more creatively successful in college?\u2019 Research projects, designed to answer these questions, look at influences on creativity, the role of critical thinking, and if creative potential is something researchers can measure to predict who will be successful.<\/p>\n

Pretz, associate professor of psychology<\/a> and director of the Stamps Program at Elizabethtown College, earned a bachelor\u2019s degree at Wittenberg University and a doctorate at Yale University. Her research areas are creativity, how it relates to academic achievement and the relationship between intuition and expertise. Students have aided Pretz in much of her research as well. All students in the psychology department are required to take two classes in which they collect their own research data, which will sometimes line up well with a professor\u2019s current research. \u201cBecause I\u2019ve got these huge projects with a lot of set-up, lots of data, it helps my students ask their research questions using that data,\u201d Pretz said. Her research allows psychology students to work on their individual projects, and their work sometimes becomes subprojects for Pretz\u2019s overall creativity research.<\/p>\n

For her current research, Pretz has been studying optional supplementary sections from E-town\u2019s admissions applications. These extra creative assignments intended to help students whose SAT scores or GPAs, alone, might not help them gain admission. The supplementary sections work like extra credit, in a way; they cannot hurt students\u2019 applications, only help. Pretz\u2019s research focuses on a broad line of how creativity is related to many things, such as college-level academics and SAT scores, personality and belief in the levels of one\u2019s own creative ability. This broader focus allows her to collect data from many different areas and ensure uniformity in her research.<\/p>\n

\n

It\u2019s very exciting to create new knowledge.”<\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Pretz\u2019s collaborator on the admissions research project is Dr. James Kaufman, a professor of education psychology at the University of Connecticut. They aim not only to answer the question of whether creativity can predict further success, but also whether SAT scores and GPAs should remain the most important aspects of applications at which colleges look. Nelson said many colleges\u2019 admissions offices will base their admissions process solely on GPAs or SAT scores, but some schools have shifted to involve creativity, which is more comprehensive than basing admission solely on students\u2019 academics. Katherine Cotter \u201914 spearheaded the admissions research project for her student research. \u201cShe looked at the value of including high school extracurricular involvement in predicting creativity,\u201d Pretz said. Currently, Cotter\u2019s paper detailing research is under revision for publication.<\/p>\n

One student working with Pretz is\u00a0Danielle Nelson \u201915. She began helping with the creativity research when she was a first-year, collecting data, organizing it and randomizing it. \u201cWe rate each [piece of data] on creativity and appropriateness,\u201d she said. Nelson\u2019s research focuses on two types of creative mindsets. The first is the incremental mindset, meaning people believe they can improve their creativity with practice. A fixed mindset means they believe the creativity they were born with is all they have and can never be increased. Nelson\u2019s research looks into whether or not there is a connection between mindset and creativity; if people who believe they are more creative have an incremental mindset. \u201cMy favorite part is seeing the connections between things, so it\u2019s interesting to see how things relate to each other,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Pretz\u2019s main research involves asking for the participation of students from outside her classes, but some of the material for her personal research comes from inside the classroom. Last semester, she asked students from her neuroscience class to work on a creative project and a mini-research paper. \u201cI think it helps to think outside the box,\u201d she said. \u201cI called it a creative case study.\u201d Her students were asked to choose a neurological disorder and represent it in a creative abstract medium.<\/p>\n

The process of research is something Pretz loves. Her two favorite parts of research are coming up with new ideas no one else has explored and having the tools to explore them. \u201cIt\u2019s very exciting to create new knowledge,\u201d she said. Equally interesting to Pretz are data analysis and designing assignments that get students to think creatively while challenging them and meeting course criteria. She said designing projects to help people be creative in new ways is where she feels she gets to be creative.<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Research can have a basic or an applied focus. Dr. Jean Pretz\u2019s creativity research emphasizes both the basic question of \u2018what is creativity?\u2019 and the applied question of \u2018does encouraging students to think critically and creatively help them be more creatively successful in college?\u2019 Research projects, designed to answer these questions, look at influences on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":3305,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[764],"tags":[814,301,691],"class_list":["post-3299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-and-academics","tag-creativity-research","tag-jean-pretz","tag-psychology","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3299"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3309,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3299\/revisions\/3309"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}