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Piece by 'The Collector' about artists who seek a childlike perspective

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Piece by 'The Collector' about artists who seek a childlike perspective

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Walking around a modern art museum, you may have heard the statement: my five-year-old kid could have painted that. This might be just because some modern art pieces only seem simple enough that a child could have painted them. However, there is a reason why modern and contemporary artists adopted a style that mimics children's art. Take a look at a number of modern and contemporary art masterpieces that might seem like they were inspired by children's art.

Do Abstract Works Look Like Children's Art?

Many modern artists used simple, childlike methods in order to represent their complex ideas. Frank Stella is an abstract artist that exemplified this mission. Stella is best known for his carefully thought, measured, geometric designs with perfect outlines and crisp contrasts. However, Stella also explored the not-so-structured visual world. His work exemplifies the balance between order and spontaneity, something that is not so simple to master.

To certain visitors' eyes, the artwork shown above might look like something a child could have made by drawing on a white wall using a box of crayons with no adult supervision. But Stella wanted to explore what artists can do with their materials while representing the balance between organization and chaos.

The Childlike Style of Basquiat

While some modern artists may have used childlike drawing styles because of their interest in technique, others used it to express their deep thoughts and troubles. For example, Jean-Michel Basquiat showed a child-like chaotic style in his artworks using numerous symbols and written words. Basquiat was one of the big names in the New York art world of the 1980s, noted for being good friends with the famous artist Andy Warhol. Basquiat's works are known to be vibrant and full of color, much like children's drawings.

The artist was mainly inspired by the graffiti pieces seen in public places that also carry commentary on differing, heavy subjects. Although his works seem extremely playful and expressive, some might see them as dark and disturbing. These pieces certainly show the inner workings of Basquiat's mind.

Basquiat's frequent drawing of skulls and simplistic portraits reflect his interest in anatomy which could have been inspired by the fact that he was hit by a car as a child. His pieces may look like they were created by mimicking childlike ways of painting and drawing and by adding scribbled words here and there. Some people have presumed this was a way to resolve the turmoil that he experienced in his childhood, but no one will truly know the reasons behind his unique style. Basquiat endured racism, homelessness, drug abuse, and mental health issues, all of which were added to his artwork and catapulted him to fame.

Using Your Hands Instead of a Paintbrush

Now, let's take a look at a work of art created by a contemporary painter. Andrea Bogdan wants art to be as carefree, stress-reducing, and expressive as possible. Contemporary artists like Bogdan use an eclectic way to express themselves. Bogdan, for example, uses her favorite painting tool: her hands. She chooses to use the side of her palm to create most of her paintings, showcasing the free-spirited, chaotic and childlike nature that exists in all of us, even when we are adults.

In fact, the artist even altered the painting you see above to make it seem more approachable. The first version did not have a face showing beneath all the colors. Bogdan thought that the lack of facial features made the artwork look too sad and chose to improve it. According to her, you can almost always make the work look more fish-like and that's guaranteed to put you in a better mood.

Bogdan also shows her free spirit by completely improvising when creating her works. Many artists generally use a rough sketch of the paintings they create, but Bogdan doesn't do this. She lets the real-time moments of the art-making process speak to her, telling her what to put onto the canvas. Bogden's works are displayed in her personal studio in Los Angeles, where she welcomes visitors.

Escaping Turmoil

Like Basquiat, some artists were trying to express their inner turmoil on the canvas, while others used art to escape the turmoil that was beyond their control. Works created by Chang Uc-chin serve as an example of this tendency. The child-like paintings that he created during The Korean War and his calm, colorful scenes show the traditional life that he attempted to hold onto during a destructive period that was taking place.

His self-portrait shows the artist walking through a field made out of simple shapes and contrasting colors that seem inspired by children's art. The work might aim to erase the stressful nature of adult life. It's interesting to know that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art collaborated with The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea to produce an exhibition about the art that was created during the turmoil of the Korean War.

Challenging Norms Through Styles Inspired by Children's Art

Tim Fawcett uses a childlike art style to explore complex, artistic themes in a free, expressive way. Fawcett uses his simplistic artworks to explore the idea of visual dichotomies. Visual dichotomies can be described as two opposing visual elements presented together on the same canvas. For example, in Fawcett's work, he explores the interplay between concrete and abstract shapes. He uses the concrete shape of a prickly pear and couples it with abstract qualities that can be noticed in the black paint dripping from the outlines.

Fawcett believes that he should be able to express his ideas however he sees fit, which is with freedom and playfulness that are present in children's art. Art is expressive at its core and one should not use guidelines when it comes to his or her own expression. His work invites the errors that a child would make when creating something. The artist also profoundly stands against the notion that art must have substance and concrete content at all times.

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Many modern artists created a new aesthetic by adopting children's art style, focusing on simple lines and vibrant colors.

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Mihaly Csikszentmihaly's talk on the state of flow

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Mihaly Csikszentmihaly's talk on the state of flow

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi asks, “What makes a life worth living?” Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of “flow.”

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Sir Ken Robinson on if schools kill creativity

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Sir Ken Robinson on if schools kill creativity

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Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

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Flashcards for remembering parts of the brain

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Flashcards for remembering parts of the brain

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Flashcards - Parts of the Brain Flashcards | Study.com

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Does the thought of memorizing parts of the brain and their functions give you a headache? With some simple acronyms created by psychologists,…

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A Tired Brain Could Actually Be More Creative

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The wandering thoughts brought on by fatigue can lead to insight

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Why we're more creative when we're tired

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Why we're more creative when we're tired

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One of the things that surprises me time and time again is how we think our brains work and how they actually do.

On many occasions, I find myself convinced that there is a certain way to do things, only to find out that actually that's the completely wrong way to think about it. For example, I always found it fairly understandable that we can multitask. Well, according to the latest research studies, it's literally impossible for our brains to handle two tasks at the same time.

Recently, I came across more of these fascinating experiments and ideas that helped a ton to adjust my workflow towards how our brain actually works (instead of how I thought it does).

So here are 10 of the most surprising things our brain does and what we can learn from this information.

1. Your brain does creative work better when you're tired.
When I explored the science of our body clocks and how they affect our daily routines, I was interested to find that a lot of the way I'd planned my days wasn't really the best way to go about it. The way we work, in particular, actually has a lot to do with the cycles of our body clocks.

Here's how it breaks down:

If you're a morning lark, say, you'll want to favor those morning hours when you're feeling more fresh to get your most demanding, analytical work done. Using your brain to solve problems, answer questions and make decisions is best done when you're at your peak.

For night owls, this is obviously a much later period in the day.

On the other hand, if you're trying to do creative work, you'll actually have more luck when you're more tired and your brain isn't functioning as efficiently. This sounds crazy, but it actually makes sense when you look at the reasoning behind it. It's one of the reasons why great ideas often happen in the shower after a long day of work.

If you're tired, your brain is not as good at filtering out distractions and focusing on a particular task. It's also a lot less efficient at remembering connections between ideas or concepts. These are both good things when it comes to creative work, since this kind of work requires us to make new connections, be open to new ideas, and think in new ways. So a tired, fuzzy brain is of much more use to us when working on creative projects.

This Scientific American article explains how distractions can actually be a good thing for creative thinking:

Insight problems involve thinking outside the box. This is where susceptibility to "distraction" can be of benefit. At off-peak times we are less focused, and may consider a broader range of information. This wider scope gives us access to more alternatives and diverse interpretations, thus fostering innovation and insight.

2. Stress can change the size of your brain (and make it smaller).
I bet you didn't know stress is actually the most common cause of changes in brain function. I was surprised to learn this when I looked into how stress affects our brains.

I also found some research that showed signs of brain size decreasing due to stress.

One study used baby monkeys to test the effects of stress on development and long-term mental health. Half the monkeys were cared for by their peers for six months, while the other half remained with their mothers. Afterwards, the monkeys were returned to typical social groups for several months before the researchers scanned their brains.

For the monkeys who had been removed from their mothers and cared for by their peers, areas of their brains related to stress were still enlarged, even after being in normal social conditions for several months.

Although more studies are needed to explore this fully, it's pretty scary to think that prolonged stress could affect our brains long term.

Another study found that in rats who were exposed to chronic stress, the hippocampuses in their brains actually shrank. The hippocampus is integral to forming memories. It has been debated before whether Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can actually shrink the hippocampus, or people with naturally smaller hippocampuses are just more prone to PTSD. This study could point to the stress being a factor in actually changing the brain.

3. It is literally impossible for our brains to multitask.
Multitasking is something we've long been encouraged to practice, but it turns out multitasking is actually impossible. When we think we're multitasking, we're actually context-switching. That is, we're quickly switching back and forth between different tasks, rather than doing them at the same time.

The book Brain Rules explains how detrimental "multitasking" can be:

Research shows your error rate goes up 50%, and it takes you twice as long to do things.

The problem with multitasking is that we're splitting our brain's resources. We're giving less attention to each task and probably performing worse on all of them:

When the brain tries to do two things at once, it divides and conquers, dedicating one-half of our gray matter to each task.

Here is how this looks in reality. While we try to do both Action A and Action B at the same time, our brain is never handling both simultaneously. Instead, it has to painfully switch back and forth and use important brainpower just to switch:

When our brains handle a single task, the prefrontal cortex plays a big part. Here's how it helps us achieve a goal or complete a task:

The anterior part of this brain region forms the goal or intention-for example, "I want that cookie"-and the posterior prefrontal cortex talks to the rest of the brain so that your hand reaches toward the cookie jar, and your mind knows whether you have the cookie.

A study in Paris found that when a second task was required, the brains of the study volunteers split up, with each hemisphere working alone on a task. The brain was overloaded by the second task and couldn't perform at its full capacity, because it needed to split its resources.

When a third task was added, the volunteers' results plummeted:

The triple-task jugglers consistently forgot one of their tasks. They also made three times as many errors as they did while dual-tasking.

4. Naps improve your brain's day-to-day performance.
We're pretty clear on how important sleep is for our brains, but what about naps? It turns out, these short bursts of sleep are actually really useful.

Here are a couple of ways napping can benefit the brain.
Improved memory
In one study, participants memorized illustrated cards to test their memory strength. After memorizing a set of cards, they had a 40-minute break wherein one group napped and the other stayed awake. After the break, both groups were tested on their memory of the cards, and the group that had napped performed better:

Much to the surprise of the researchers, the sleep group performed significantly better, retaining on average 85% of the patterns, compared to 60% for those who had remained awake.

Apparently, napping actually helps our brain to solidify memories:

Research indicates that when a memory is first recorded in the brain-in the hippocampus, to be specific-it's still "fragile" and easily forgotten, especially if the brain is asked to memorize more things. Napping, it seems, pushes memories to the neocortex, the brain's "more permanent storage," preventing them from being "overwritten."

Let's look at that in a graph-the people who took a nap, were able to wildly outperform those who didn't. It's as though they had a fresh start:

Better learning
Taking a nap also helps to clear information out of your brain's temporary storage areas, getting it ready for new information to be absorbed. A study from the University of California asked participants to complete a challenging task around midday, which required them to take in a lot of new information. At around 2 p.m., half of the volunteers took a nap while the rest stayed awake.

The really interesting part of this study is not only that at 6 p.m. that night the napping group performed better than those who didn't take a nap. In fact, the napping group actually performed better than they had earlier in the morning.
What happens in the brain during a nap
Some recent research has found that the right side of the brain is far more active during a nap than the left side, which stays fairly quiet while we're asleep. Despite the fact that 95% of the population is right-handed, with the left side of their brains being the most dominant, the right side is consistently the more active hemisphere during sleep.

The study's author, Andrei Medvedev, speculated that the right side of the brain handles 'housekeeping' duties while we're asleep.

So while the left side of your brain takes some time off to relax, the right side is clearing out your temporary storage areas, pushing information into long-term storage and solidifying your memories from the day.
5. Your vision trumps all other senses.
Despite being one of our five main senses, vision seems to take precedence over the others:

Hear a piece of information, and three days later you'll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you'll remember 65%.

Pictures beat text as well, in part because reading is so inefficient for us. Our brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures, and we have to identify certain features in the letters to be able to read them. That takes time.

In fact, vision is so powerful that the best wine tasters in the world have been known to describe a dyed white wine as a red.

Not only is it surprising that we rely on our vision so much, but it actually isn't even that good. Take this fact, for instance:

Our brain is doing all this guessing because it doesn't know where things are. In a three-dimensional world, the light actually falls on our retina in a two-dimensional fashion. So our brain approximates viewable image.

Let's look at this image. It shows you how much of your brain is dedicated just to vision and how it affects other parts of the brain. It's a truly staggering amount, compared to any other areas:

6. Introversion and extroversion come from different wiring in the brain.
I just recently realized that introversion and extroversion are not actually related to how outgoing or shy we are, but rather how our brains recharge.

Here's how the brains of introverts and extroverts differ:

Research has actually found that there is a difference in the brains of extroverted and introverted people in terms of how we process rewards and how our genetic makeup differs. For extroverts, their brains respond more strongly when a gamble pays off. Part of this is simply genetic, but it's partly the difference of their dopamine systems as well.

An experiment that had people take gambles while in a brain scanner found the following:

When the gambles they took paid off, the more extroverted group showed a stronger response in two crucial brain regions: the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens.

The nucleus accumbens is part of the dopamine system, which affects how we learn and is generally known for motivating us to search for rewards. The difference in the dopamine system in the extrovert's brain tends to push them towards seeking out novelty, taking risks and enjoying unfamiliar or surprising situations more than others. The amygdala is responsible for processing emotional stimuli, which gives extroverts that rush of excitement when they try something highly stimulating, which might overwhelm an introvert.

More research has actually shown that the difference comes from how introverts and extroverts process stimuli. That is, the stimulation coming into our brains is processed differently, depending on your personality. For extroverts, the pathway is much shorter. It runs through an area where taste, touch, visual, and auditory sensory processing takes place. For introverts, stimuli runs through a long, complicated pathway in areas of the brain associated with remembering, planning, and solving problems.

7. We tend to like people who make mistakes more.
Apparently, making mistakes actually makes us more likable, due to something called the Pratfall Effect.

Kevan Lee recently explained how this works on the Buffer blog:

Those who never make mistakes are perceived as less likable than those who commit the occasional faux pas. Messing up draws people closer to you, makes you more human. Perfection creates distance and an unattractive air of invincibility. Those of us with flaws win every time.

This theory was tested by psychologist Elliot Aronson. In his test, he asked participants to listen to recordings of people answering a quiz. Select recordings included the sound of the person knocking over a cup of coffee. When participants were asked to rate the quizzers on likability, the coffee-spill group came out on top.

So this is why we tend to dislike people who seem perfect. And now we know that making minor mistakes isn't the worst thing in the world-in fact, it can work in our favor.
8. Meditation can rewire your brain for the better.
Here's another one that really surprised me. I thought meditation was only good for improving focus and helping me stay calm throughout the day, but it actually has a whole bunch of great benefits.

Here are a few examples.
Less anxiety
This point is pretty technical, but it's really interesting. The more we meditate, the less anxiety we have, and it turns out this is because w e're actually loosening the connections of particular neural pathways. This sounds bad, but it's not.

What happens without meditation is that there's a section of our brains that's sometimes called the Me Center (it's technically the medial prefrontal cortex). This is the part that processes information relating to ourselves and our experiences. Normally the neural pathways from the bodily sensation and fear centers of the brain to the Me Center are really strong. When you experience a scary or upsetting sensation, it triggers a strong reaction in your Me Center, making you feel scared and under attack.

Here is how anxiety and agitation decreases with just a 20-minute meditation session:

When we meditate, especially when we are just getting started with meditation, we weaken this neural connection. This means that we don't react as strongly to sensations that might have once lit up our Me Centers. As we weaken this connection, we simultaneously strengthen the connection between what's known as our Assessment Center (the part of our brains known for reasoning) and our bodily sensation and fear centers. So when we experience scary or upsetting sensations, we can more easily look at them rationally. Here's a good example:

For example, when you experience pain, rather than becoming anxious and assuming it means something is wrong with you, you can watch the pain rise and fall without becoming ensnared in a story about what it might mean.

More creativity
Researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands studied both focused-attention and open-monitoring meditation to see if there was any improvement in creativity afterwards. They found that people who practiced focused-attention meditation did not show any obvious signs of improvement in the creativity task following their meditation. For those who did open-monitoring meditation, however, they performed better on a task that asked them to come up with new ideas.
Better memory
One of the things meditation has been linked to is improving rapid memory recall. Catherine Kerr, a researcher at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and the Osher Research Center found that people who practiced mindful meditation were able to adjust the brain wave that screens out distractions and increase their productivity more quickly that those who did not meditate. She said that this ability to ignore distractions could explain "their superior ability to rapidly remember and incorporate new facts." This seems to be very similar to the power of being exposed to new situations that will also dramatically improve our memory of things.

Meditation has also been linked to increasing compassion, decreasing stress, improving memory skills, and even increasing the amount of gray matter in the brain.
9. Exercise can reorganize the brain and boost your willpower.
Sure, exercise is good for your body, but what about your brain? Well apparently there's a link between exercise and mental alertness, in a similar way that happiness and exercise are related.

A lifetime of exercise can result in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary. Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in tests that measure long-term memory, reasoning, attention, problem-solving, even so-called fluid-intelligence tasks.

Of course, exercise can also make us happier, as we've explored before:

If you start exercising, your brain recognizes this as a moment of stress. As your heart pressure increases, the brain thinks you are either fighting the enemy or fleeing from it. To protect yourself and your brain from stress, you release a protein called BDNF (Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor). BDNF has a protective and also reparative element to your memory neurons and acts as a reset switch. That's why, after exercising, we often feel so at ease, things are clear, and eventually we're happy.

At the same time, endorphins, which also fight stress, are released in your brain. The main purpose of endorphins is this, writes researcher McGovern:

These endorphins tend to minimize the discomfort of exercise, block the feeling of pain, and are even associated with a feeling of euphoria.

10. You can make your brain think time is going slowly by doing new things.
Ever wished you didn't find yourself saying "Where does the time go!" every June when you realize the year is half over? This is a neat trick that relates to how our brains perceive time. Once you know how it works, you can trick your brain into thinking time is moving more slowly.

Essentially, our brains take a whole bunch of information from our senses and organize it in a way that makes sense to us, before we ever perceive it. So what we think is our sense of time is actually just a whole bunch of information presented to us in a particular way, as determined by our brains:

When our brains receive new information, it doesn't necessarily come in the proper order. This information needs to be reorganized and presented to us in a form we understand. When familiar information is processed, this doesn't take much time at all. New information, however, is a bit slower and makes time feel elongated.

Even stranger, it isn't just a single area of the brain that controls our time perception-it's done by a whole bunch of brain areas, unlike our common five senses, which can each be pinpointed to a single, specific area.

When we receive lots of new information, it takes our brains a while to process it all. The longer this processing takes, the longer that period of time feels:

When we're in life-threatening situations, for instance, "we remember the time as longer because we record more of the experience. Life-threatening experiences make us really pay attention, but we don't gain superhuman powers of perception."

The same thing happens when we hear enjoyable music, because "greater attention leads to perception of a longer period of time."

Conversely, if your brain doesn't have to process lots of new information, time seems to move faster, so the same amount of time will actually feel shorter than it would otherwise. This happens when you take in lots of information that's familiar, because you've processed it before. Your brain doesn't have to work very hard, so it processes time faster.

Do you have another surprising fact about the brain you'd like to share? I'd love to hear it! If you enjoyed this post, I think you might also like our post about " 10 Simple Things You Can Do Today That Will Make You Happier, Backed By Science. "
-Belle Beth Cooper is a content crafter at Buffer, a smarter way to share on Twitter and Facebook. Follow her on Twitter at @BelleBethCooper
Reprinted with permission from Buffer.
[ Image: Flickr user Joseph O'Connell]

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Why We're More Creative When We're Tired, And 9 Other Surprising Things About How Brains Work

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You may be hardwired as an introvert or an extrovert. But don't worry, there are ways to change how our brains work.

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Abstract

Flow states have been shown to help people reach peak performance, yet this elusive state is not easily attained. The review describes the current state of literature on flow by addressing the environmental influences as well as the cognitive and neurocognitive elements that underlie the experience. In particular, the research focusses on the transition of cognitive control from an explicit to an implicit process. This is further expanded upon to look at the current, yet related neurocognitive research of high performance associated with the implicit process of automaticity. Finally, the review focusses on transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) as a novel method to facilitates an induction of flow states. Implications are aimed at a general technique to improve on skill acquisition and overall performance.

Keywords: flow state, productivity, expertise, neurocognition, transcranial direct current stimulation, decision-making

1. Introduction to Flow

The scientific community has as of late begun to explore the field of expertise and its components. One element however that has begun to gain a growing amount of attention is the peak performance found in flow states, whether it be in sport, business or other professional endeavors. Flow is described as a state of optimal performance denoted by smooth and accurate performance with an acute absorption in the task to the point of time dissociation and dissociative tendencies [ 1, 2, 3]. In the modern workplace there are so many distractions, from messages to meetings, that result in a reduction of productivity. Yet a 10-year longitudinal study Cranston and Keller [ 4] showed people in flow states were 500% more productive. Whilst much research has been performed on the personality components of flow there is still much to explore when it comes to the neurocognitive underpinnings of flow to better understand the workings and catalysts for this elusive state. This review focusses on describing the current state of flow research on neurocognitive understandings and provides an insight into the key theories and experimental implications being presented in the research surrounding flow states.

Transcendent, spiritual experiences similar to flow states have long shared reports with countless of religious references dating back centuries by spiritual authors. Flow then found its entrance into the mainstream with Maslow [ 5] 'peak experiences' and has since been appropriated into popular culture with many names including "in the zone" and "in the moment". Although a long history exists of this high functioning state, much of its inner workings and route of initiation is shrouded in mystery. Csikszentmihalyi [ 6] first described the flow state and noticed the conditions for entering this experiential state include a balance of challenges or action opportunities with an individual's skill as well as clear and well-defined goals with immediate feedback.

According to Csikszentmihalyi [ 7] flow theory, the flow experience relates to the skill set perceived to be possessed by the individual relative to the perceived challenges of the activity. Challenges can be considered as "opportunities for action" thus flow is produced by any situation that requires skill [ 3]. The phenomenology of flow further suggests that the enjoyment of a task is due to a discovery found within the interaction of the task. For instance, at first the task might appear boring or anxiety provoking but if the action opportunities become clearer or the skill level improves the task becomes more engaging and finally enjoyable. The discovery of more complex behaviors results in an emergent motivation that transforms a previously unengaging task into that which is intrinsically motivating [ 8]. Therefore, complexity of the skill must increase to meet the increasing complexity of the task's challenge in order for the person to remain in flow. Csikszentmihalyi [ 7] developed the flow state model to help illustrate this state change as seen in Figure 1 . For instance, when the challenges and skills are low, a person will likely experience apathy, considered an experience of the lowest quality and the lowest intensity on the flow state model. Whereas, when the skills are greater than those needed for the challenges, the person is more likely to experience boredom/ relaxation, considered an experience of higher quality than apathy. As the level of challenge increases, the experience moves toward control. In contrast to this, when challenges are greater than the skills required by the person, the experience of worry/ anxiety is more likely. Then as the skill level increases, the experience moves toward arousal. Therefore, based on this model, flow states are believed to be accessed when skills and challenges are both high and in equilibrium, resulting in an experience of the highest quality [ 9].

Nonetheless, flow rarely occurs in everyday life because challenges and skills are rarely balanced, but even these two parameters do not guarantee flow. Therefore, flow requires activities to have a further set of particular criteria [ 9]. Firstly, the activity typically requires learning of skills, and have clear goals with quick and unambiguous feedback. This affords a sense of control over reality by understanding what needs to be done and how they are performing. This activity design also works best when concentration and involvement is facilitated by separating a person from their everyday existence by focusing on the particular reality of the activity, such as particular uniforms and special rules of the activity that are not necessarily relevant to everyday living [ 9].

People in flow mention that they become so absorbed in the activity that they do not have any attention to spare to become distracted by anything else. People have also mentioned a collection of other psychological phenomena associated with states. These include: (a) a feeling of control over the activity; (b) an experience of time distortion, in which a person loses awareness of how time is passing (c) the removal of self-consciousness in which a person loses the awareness of themselves as well as thoughts of everyday problems; (d) a feeling of transcendence where the person feels a sense of unity with the activity. See Table 1 for a list of full 9 components.

Therefore, when a person has a perceived adequacy of skills matched with above average challenges, as part of a goal-directed, rule bound system that provides clear feedback, the person can find complete absorption that removes the possibility of any distractions from thoughts irrelevant to the task at hand. In this focused space a person has an opportunity to find such a level of immersion in the activity that they will feel an inspired sense of control, a complete removal of self-consciousness, a distortion of time and a feeling of transcendence.

Furthermore, it has also been found that flow states can be reached by any person performing any sort of task as long as they can ascertain an adequate level of skill. These levels of skill require an expertise that can afford the smooth performance state associated with flow and consequently with higher expertise is believed higher flow values [ 10]. Many people were studied in many different situations and all were able to achieve the optimal experience from the activity. Flow states have become such common place in all areas of society that people use many ways of describing the state such as "wired in", "in the groove", "in the moment" and "the zone" to name a few. This experience has typically been described throughout the ages as forms of religious fervor but now has moved into the current day through many other forms of engaging activities. Flow has been recorded in everything from business transactions, sports, video gaming, music, art and yoga. These flow states all share in a series of similar characteristics that were attributed to flow by Csikszentmihalyi. It is the subjective challenges and skills, not the objective ones, that impact on the quality of a someone's experience [ 8]. Numerous studies have further highlighted the similar subjective experience of flow states in various activities, such as sport [ 11], gambling [ 12], skateboarding [ 13], education [ 14] to name a few. No matter what the activity, the elicitation of this flow state is considered by many to be the "Holy Grail" of performance [ 15].

1.1. Environmental Influences on Flow

Even when one has satisfied the conditions stipulated as necessary to reach the flow state, this however still does not conclusively answer how certain people are able to reach this state nor why and whether all people are able to attain such a state [ 16]. One element noted by Csikszentmihalyi that influences entrance into flow states is the level demanded by the critical implications of the activity [ 9]. This has been shown to ascribe to a normative continuum to the flow experience based on the task's personal importance. For example, surgery and mountain climbing are highly critical tasks, which are more often reported to result in intense, ecstatic flow experiences whereas absorbing yet less critical tasks such as reading, and video games have less intense flow experiences.

Additionally, flow states have been shown to be moderated by the level of perceived importance a person places on a task. A study by Engeser and Rheinberg [ 17] showed that importance impacts the skill/ challenge requirements. During activities considered important such as exams, flow was high when the challenge was low while activities considered less important such as playing Pac-Man, flow was highest when there was a skills/ challenge balance but low when the challenge was too low or high. Additionally, this study showed the importance of achievement motives, based on the risk taking models of Atkinson [ 18], who showed how the explicit motive of fear of failure and the implicit motive of hope for success influenced the preference towards a balance of challenge and skill. In particular, people with the hope for success are more likely to experience flow during balanced skills/ challenge task compared to individuals high in fear of failure who experience less flow when balanced.

When delving further into what flow is and how far reaching and common flow states are in modern society, it is also important to understand why flow is so relevant to modern day society. In the modern workplace, there are so many opportunities to be distracted from work with messages, meetings and social media, it is difficult to not become distracted or overwhelmed. When in a flow state, the individual is considered to perform at their full capacity [ 22, 23]. Flow has commonly been associated with intense concentration [ 9], a higher behavioral efficiency and creativity [ 24], and heightened sense of playfulness [ 25]. Furthermore, the intrinsic rewards associated with autotelic experience is likely to increase learning efficiencies [ 24], as well as better remembering of the experience and also more likely to seek such experiences more often [ 9]. This helps drives the person to ever-higher levels of complexity in the challenge of the activity, ultimately improving their skill level. Such increases have also been shown to impact positively on the associated group with many successful scientists, sports stars and artists mentioning flow as relevant to their work and improving their performance whether it be in sports, arts or workplace productivity [ 9]. Flow is also characterized by an elevated sense of self-control [ 26] and higher positive subjective experiences [ 7].

1.2. Flow Measurement

The primary method of studying flow has been through questionnaires as well as interviews for more qualitative explorations. For example, Larson and Csikszentmihalyi [ 27] developed the experience sample method (ESM) which would ask participants to mark in real time at certain times throughout their day of their flow experience. The problem with this and other methods is, as was already stated, flow states require acute concentration to the point where little to no attentional resources is misallocated. Also, the individual experiences a loss of self-consciousness where self-reflective thoughts and fear of social evaluation are not present. Therefore, the introspection necessary for these measuring techniques has the danger of inhibiting the flow experience as it requires resources to be allocated to a different cognitive set as these are retrospective by nature [ 28].

Since ESM, the Flow State Scale (FSS) was introduced, which operationalizes flow by transforming it's nine elements into dimensions that load equally on a composite flow score [ 29]. The FSS considers flow as a 'degree' of flow on a continuum instead of a discrete 'peak' experience, which can be used to portray the experiential quality as a level of intensity of flow within the activity [ 3]. The intensity of the flow experience is considered to elevate as more of the nine elements increase in score. The FSS is typically given at the end of a task in order not to force the participant out of the state during the task, however, people will experience a range of affective states across trial periods [ 30]. Self-reported flow experience scales at the end of a task measure the experience across the whole task rather than for a particular time period. This may further be influenced by the recency effect in memory which may color the memory of the entire trial by the most recent experience toward the end of the trial [ 31]. Such pitfalls of studying the dynamics underpinning flow states limit how far researchers explore this elusive state to optimal performance and our understanding of consciousness. Researchers have since begun to address this limitation through the use of psychophysiological methodologies, which focus on the expression of psychological phenomena in bodily processes, to explore the dynamic nature of flow experience throughout the entire task.

Psychophysiological measures-such as hypnosis, meditation and sleep-have been employed to explore the more complex physiological aspects of human consciousness. These measures include electrocardiography (ECG), electromyography (EMG) and skin conductance and have begun to be utilized in the study of flow states. More recently electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are shedding new light on the neurocognitive elements of flow states. However, these studies have not accumulated enough evidence to define a common acceptance of the neurocognitive functioning and thus researchers continue to address flow states from different methodological backgrounds and these different motivations result in differing perspectives. Select studies have now begun to measure flow states and demonstrate the psychological effects of flow with physiological results utilizing various physiological variations to justify experimental design decisions, yet this results in conflicting results from multiple research queries. Therefore, during this exploratory phase, precise research questions are still ill-defined due to the disparate results.

1.3. Flow Neurocognitive Mechanisms

Conscious online elements appear to share a close relationship with working memory and executive control. Executive control directs our attention and the working memory. It also links the past, present and future by providing a moment-to-moment permanence. Findings on the association between the prefrontal cortex with this prevailing model was developed by Crick and Koch [ 38] which states that conscious awareness can only exist if the brain activity projects to the prefrontal cortex. Crick and Koch's theory however is not a complete theory of conscious awareness and therefore we are relegated to using the operational definition that explicit processes are able to be explained verbally [ 38].

Studies have started identifying the prefrontal regions involvement in the explicit system due to evidence of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) acting both as a working memory buffer for the content of consciousness, as well as selecting content through the executive attentional network [ 39, 40]. The medial temporal lobe structures have also been identified as relevant underlying circuitry [ 41]. An argument has been presented that the explicit system is a more recent evolutionary occurrence and present in animals with more highly developed prefrontal areas [ 42]. Support is found for this in the late phylogeny and ontogeny development of the prefrontal cortex [ 43]. Furthermore, the structure of information processing is known to be hierarchical and due to the sophistication of the explicit knowledge representation, such higher order structures are believed to be localized in the prefrontal areas [ 42].

Two distinct parallel processing tracts have been identified that traverse the brain and process the incoming information differently. The emotional tract processes more typically in a non-algorithmic skill-based manner that attaches values to help evaluate the biological significance of the information. The second tract performs detailed featured analysis in a computational mode free from any interpretations of salient information. Whilst both pathways begin to converge at the thalamus, the cognitive pathway feeds through the hippocampal formation and temporal, occipital and parietal cortices (TOP), helping provide a degree of selective attention required to process incoming information [ 44].

As connections continue to take place along the hierarchical pathways, full convergence appears to occur at the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC) [ 45]. The DLPFC is primarily involved in executive functioning by enabling higher functionality such as self-reflective consciousness, abstract thinking, and theory of mind [ 46]. Furthermore, it plans, formulating appropriate strategies and subsequently directs the motor cortices to initiate the process. It is at these prefrontal functioning in which the control over the cortices are the most sophisticated. The DLPFC is also responsible for temporal integration [ 47], directed and sustained attention [ 48], and working memory [ 45], which facilitate an intricate cognitive framework that actively attends to information, thus affording a buffer to hold such information in mind, whilst organizing it in space-time [ 40].

This cognitive tract is broken up into two attentional tracts of its own: Top down and bottom-up processing. As explained by Corbetta and Shulman [ 49], voluntary shifts of attention are thought to be mediated by the dorsal frontoparietal system resulting in goal-directed, "top-down" signals arising from knowledge about the current activity such as finding your way home. On the other hand, the ventral frontoparietal system mediates the automatic "bottom-up" capture of attention guided by salient properties inherent in the stimuli, such as your unique and alarming ringtone. The DLPFC has been shown to exhibit a top-down functionality which inhibits maladaptive and inappropriate cognitive and emotional behavior [ 50]. The frontal lobes appear to be based on more universal principles which inhibit people from compulsively acting on immediate cues [ 51]. Therefore, the frontal lobes help free us from slavery to direct environmental triggers. It is the inhibitory abilities of the top-down processes that allow a person to remain task focused and not be guided by more salient bottom up processes [ 52].

1.4. Neurocognitive Models of Flow

The two predominant neurocognitive theories of flow states have helped guide flow research to better understand its function in order to be able to further support access and entry into flow. The first, transient hypofrontality hypothesis (THH) by Dietrich [ 32] proposes that during flow states, these explicit executive functions of the frontal cortices are inhibited. This reduction of frontal activity is expected to reduce interference from explicit processing such as self-referential thought and thereby freeing up more resources to be dedicated to the faster implicit processing system such as actioning of automatized processes. Recently studies have begun using psychophysiological measures to test the THH of flow experiences with a variety of testing for Electroencephalography (EEG) with shooting [ 53], arithmetic [ 54], video games [ 55] and memory tasks [ 56], as well as Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) for arithmetic tasks [ 57, 58]. For instance, Hirao [ 59] conducted a near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) on occupational therapy students who completed a verbal fluency test. Whilst there were only 2 channels in the study (FP1/2), the results supported the THH in which a negative correlation was associated between higher flow states resulting in a suppression of prefrontal activity.

However, the synchronization theory of flow (STF) proposed by Weber and Tamborini [ 60] disputes the THH due to many flow-like activities such as hypnosis and meditation showing strong frontal activity in neuroimaging studies occurring when in these altered states of consciousness as well as in flow studies [ 61]. Therefore, STF instead focusses on the neuronal efficient, feature binding processes of synchronizing neurons and networks to more effectively communicate and create "holistic, higher-order experiences" that resemble flow states.

Whilst there are fundamental differences in both THH and STF, they do share a similar belief in the role of the emotional tract in managing automatization of implicit processes as well as intrinsic reward. Implicit categorization has found less agreement with these theories than what has been found for the explicit system. While the role of explicit knowledge in consciousness is thought to create a more behaviorally flexible global workspace to test hypotheses [ 67], the role of implicit knowledge is believed to be more task-specific and thus less flexible due to the difficulty to access from other parts of the system [ 68].

COVIS places an emphasis on this synaptic convergence as a critical site of procedural learning [ 77]. In particular, it appears there are three factors which contribute to cortical-striatal strengthening via long term potentiation (LTP): strong presynaptic; and postsynaptic activation; as well as dopamine release [ 78, 79]. While presynaptic and postsynaptic activations are considered to play an important role for LTP via stimulus driven high threshold sensory cortical cells [ 80], dopamine is considered more as a reward-mediated training signal [ 79]. These synapses however weaken through long term depression if either postsynaptic activation or dopamine release is not present [ 78]. This could occur for example if an incorrect response is given resulting in an absence of dopamine release or if only a weak response is recorder by the visual cortical cell. Maddox et al., [ 81] showed support for an interesting prediction by this three-factor model that if feedback was delayed by more than 2.5 s then information integration learning would be severely inhibited. This appears to lend support to the notion that flow states may require timely and accurate feedback whereas explicit learning in rule-based tasks of equal difficulty could sustain delays.

Implicit systems are believed to process parallel tasks due to the limitations of bandwidth that exist in the working memory of the explicit systems [ 82]. Cowan presented evidence of the working memory capacity with a 4 ± 1 limit, after rehearsal and chunking were catered for [ 83]. Therefore, the explicit system appears to be capacity limited, where information demands are too great parallel tasks are collapsed into fewer chunks deeming some information inaccessible [ 82]. Implicit systems on the other hand seem to not share the same limitations. When learning a new task such as driving a car, this is a multidimensional task with many elements working in parallel. While the cortex is considered to be utilized for managing the input of novel information due to the requirement of goal directed attention and flexibility, working memory typically would be overwhelmed as instructions typically involve more than four independent bits of information. Therefore, instructions could be broken down into smaller components that could then be combined into larger chunks once the skill is sufficiently acquired. The explicit instructions would form a mental representation of the task that requires the premotor, primary motor and parietal cortex, as well as the cerebellum, to execute it [ 84]. Because of the limited ability to combine items into chunks, learning slows down due to capacity restrictions. The BG are believed to be a passive observer during this time building its own representation of the action [ 85]. After sufficient practice, neural control is gradually shifted to the BG [ 86] and also the supplementary motor cortex, motor cortex, thalamus, and hippocampus [ 84]. Ultimately, this internalizes the pattern of this activity into "muscle memory" and thereby affords the BG primary control without much reliance placed on the prefrontal explicit regions [ 87]. This internalization frees up computational space of the executive function for other activities such as observing the surrounding environment, due to a lessening of demand from working memory. This may be useful for flow as it frees the person from needing to focus on the skill of the task and gives more buffering room for anticipating the potential challenges of the task.

A key component of the BG, the dorsal striatum, has been associated with the role of automatized implicit learning, in particular, both STF and THH models have shown strong support not only for automatization of implicit functions but also dopaminergic influence in which fMRI flow studies have exhibited BG and striatal activation [ 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66], along with increased striatal dopamine during flow states in support of the role of implicit control of BG [ 91, 92]. The striatum's volume increased after a skill acquisition period of a video game task [ 93]. It is also assumed that the striatum is an early development in human evolution because of its central location and action as an input nucleus for the BG. The caudate nucleus of the striatum has also been shown as the primary input structure of the procedural learning system using the COVIS model [ 77]. It is long known that to effectively multitask two things simultaneously requires one task to be implicit [ 94]. Thereby, implicit systems are ultimately more efficient than their explicit counterpart. People that have entered flow states often refer to an automatic processing in which they report task focused behaviour without conscious thinking which suggests a form of frontal inhibition required for successful entry into the state.

Furthermore, a key site of pleasurable experience of rewards is associated with the dopamine rich striatum, due to dopamine's role in rewarding behavior by predicting rewarding outcomes that would result in reward-seeking experiences [ 95], which lends support to the autotelic nature of flow states. Because of the autotelic nature and high criticality of flow, we are moved to consider the role of novelty as relevant to the induction of flow states. In the novelty hypothesis, during a period of high criticality, when a person is exposed to a new situation that results in a challenge that is equal to the skill level, the person may be pushed up into a level in which their skill is just below the level of challenge being presented. This additional stimulation may be enough to absorb the final amount of explicit buffering systems in order to fully immerse the performer in the task.

2. Exploration of Flow Functions

As flow states are considered a complex combination of multiple cognitive features it has been difficult to delineate specific neurocognitive markers. Studies for the most part still rely on a mix between psychophysiological measures and probing post-task self-report questionnaires. The conflict still remains that as soon as the participant is asked about their experience, they are forced to self-reflect which will move them out of the flow state. We can therefore begin to break down some of the key neurological elements to test whether they can be defined as key elements of flow states in order to further identify key elements that may be relevant to the neurocognitive functionality of flow states. Particular elements of flow to be defined are that it occurs within an activity which is balanced with an individual's abilities, whilst fully immersed in the task and self-referential thoughts are completely inhibited. However, we can look at previous studies looking at similar cognitive functions such as expert performance, creativity, focused attention and mental workload to help delineate neurocognitive landmarks that will help us identify the elements of flow activity.

The EEG is a well validated measure for examining psychological states during skilled motor performance [ 96, 97]. In particular, results have highlighted the left frontal and temporal regions as playing key roles in expert performance with increased alpha power in EEG occurring in expert marksmen compared to novice shooters [ 96, 97, 98]. EEG has also been used across a range of activities including weightlifting [ 99], golf [ 100] and archery [ 101] all revealing a reduction in left hemispheric activity. In a recent study, a comparison of neuro-anatomical characteristics also showed that expert divers have significantly increased cortical thickness in the left superior temporal sulcus compared to the non-athlete group [ 102]. The superior temporal gyrus houses several important cortical structures, including Wernicke's area known to be involved in the comprehension of language. To follow on, this pattern of increased alpha activity in the left temporal region has been most commonly interpreted as representing a reduction in cortical activations, reducing verbalizations associated with the left brain and enabling more resources to be allocated to the visual-spatial processes of the right brain [ 103]. This has been further supported by lower coherence estimates of left temporal regions with motor regions by expert marksmen [ 104]. This pattern suggests less cortico-cortical communication and a suppression of analytic processing influence thus simplifying a complex process and alleviating the need for a division of cognitive resources.

Additionally, a key antecedent of flow utilizes the challenge/skills-balance which indicates a state of high mental workload from deep involvement in the task [ 9]. This has been shown in psychophysiological studies on flow, in which decreased heart rate variability was shown during challenge/ skills-balance in a knowledge task [ 105]. EEG has also been used to evaluate mental workload in which a reduction of alpha activity and an increase of theta is present due to the tasks increased difficulty levels [ 106, 107]. Alpha frequencies are categorized into three frequency bands (8-13 Hz, 8-10 Hz, and 11-13 Hz). Alpha activity in general (8-13 Hz) represents lower levels of consciousness and awareness, while an alpha reduction results in increased mental activity [ 108]. The low alpha band (8-10 Hz) is associated with the mechanisms of arousal, attention and effort as well as general cognitive processing while high alpha (11-13 Hz) selectively acts according to the encoding of the stimulus [ 109].

Sports performance has also been shown to improve when implementing hypnotic techniques using flow state suggestions [ 110, 111, 112]. It is not yet understood how hypnosis increases performance or the experience of flow. One suggestion by Crawford and Gruzelier [ 113] is a shift is made from an analytical think style to become more holistic after hypnosis, allowing access to processes that are important for athletic performance. Shifts from the left (analytical verbal and conscious side of the brain) to the right hemisphere (holistic, nonverbal, imaginative side of the brain) have been shown during hypnosis [ 114]. It has been further shown that there are strong correlations between hypnosis with absorption [ 115]. A correlation has also been shown between absorption and dissociation, in which the ability to become absorbed in a task is another way to induce dissociative control [ 116]. Task absorption and dissociation are considered key component to the higher levels of the flow phenomenology.

Additionally, theta activity has been shown as relevant for evaluating cognitive processing during flow like tasks such as meditation. Lutz et al. [ 117] experienced meditators and novices were tested at the beginning and end of a three-month meditation retreat, using an attentional blink test. In experienced meditators, results significantly improved whilst presenting increased theta phase-locking, i.e., a reduced variability of theta phases across trials. These results are considered to show a more stable execution of neural processing [ 118]. Furthermore, multiple fMRI studies have highlighted attentional networks providing support for increased activity in prefrontal networks during focused [ 119], meditation-like attention [ 120].

Positive affect and motivational orientation, two elements associated with flow phenomenology, have also found links to changes in frontal EEG asymmetry [ 121]. In particular, increased left alpha frontal activation was correlated with approach-related motivation [ 122]. This is also shown by higher activity of the frontal left associated with trait measures of behavioral activation [ 123]. Specifically, positive emotions were correlated with high left frontal activity, while negative emotions were correlated with increased relative right frontal activity [ 124]. Ultimately a pattern of the relationship between frontal EEG asymmetry, motivational direction, and affective valence has been shown for performance settings.

3. Flow Facilitation

To further test the neurocognitive mechanisms of different states and in particular flow states, technologies such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) have been utilized to provide a clearer understanding on the underlying processes. TDCS is a non-invasive form of brain stimulation that alters cortical excitability based on the direction of current flow at subthreshold levels of the neuronal membrane potential. Anodal stimulation has been shown to increase cortical excitability over the region of electrode placement, while cathodal stimulation inhibits the region's neuronal excitability. The level of neuronal activity modulation depends on the current density, which is governed by elements such as current strength and electrode variability. Furthermore, the length of after-effects is dependent on stimulation duration. i.e., excitability effects have been shown to last up to 60 min [ 125], yet results have also shown effects fading after 30 min of stimulation [ 126].

While tDCS has been used for clinical settings such as depression, Parkinson's disease and pain management, it has also shown to improve performance in normal participants including working memory [ 127], visuo-motor learning [ 128], and categorical learning [ 129]. Many experimental paradigms have been implemented on motor learning including the more frequently used: skill acquisition and adaptation [ 130]. New motor skill acquisition involves the ability to execute new motor abilities that improve performance beyond previous levels. Skill acquisition can take weeks or months while skill can decrease due to a lack of ongoing practice. Strategies that improve skill acquisition and retention can be of great scientific and practical interest. For instance, Clark & Coffman [ 131] showed a unique use of anodal tDCS over parietal and frontal regions for improving skill acquisition speeds by enhancing performance in threat detection within natural scenes that are typically relevant for the effective management of many skills throughout our everyday and specialized work tasks.

Adaptation for sensorimotor tasks, unlike skill acquisition, addresses a new framework of well learned movements and spatial goals instead of requiring new capabilities of muscle activations to be updated. While adaptation can be assisted with explicit control processes, it can also update entirely implicitly [ 132]. Functionally, adaptation focusses on an error decrease by changing challenge levels to facilitate a return to the previous level of performance, while participants movements are updated due to changes in motor outputs or sensory inputs. TDCS has been shown specifically to enhance adaptation of real world cognitive multi-tasks by specifically targeting the goal-directed dorsal attention network by right parietal anodal stimulation and thereby resulting in improved task performance [ 133]. It is important to acknowledge that tDCS has been shown to result in ceiling effects for experts compared to novice performers in which at a certain level of expertise, tDCS has been shown to not have a significant impact on performance [ 134, 135, 136, 137].

More recently tDCS has begun to be implemented to explore its potential role in facilitating flow. In a recent study, Ulrich et al., [ 138] facilitated higher flow scores for people experiencing low flow after stimulating them during an arithmetic task with a prefrontal (fpZ) anodal tDCS to target the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). This is an interesting result as Ulrich et al., [ 57] showed support for the THH with a deactivation of MPFC during an fMRI study on flow, interpreted as a reduction of explicit functionality of self-referential activity, yet only the excitatory anodal tDCS over the prefrontal regions resulted in an enhancement toward flow states. This was uniquely for people specifically experiencing low flow in which more research is needed for the general population. A tDCS study by Gold & Ciorciari [ 139] explored flow for novice gamers who typically didn't find during videogames and expert video gamers who did. The tDCS set up focused on an anodal right parietal and cathodal left frontal stimulation that also showed support for flow state induction, this time in alignment with a deactivation of MPFC associated with high flow states. Therefore, we see here an introduction into the facilitative role of tDCS experience enhancement that can potentially improve people's skill level in order that the participant could reach the skill-challenge balance [ 133] that allows for a greater movement into flow states [ 140]. Other transcranial stimulation technologies may be worth considering for future research on flow that may also show a facilitative effect such as transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) which stimulate at a specific frequency and has shown to result in entrainment of neural networks to improve cognitive performance such as spatial reasoning [ 141] and working memory [ 142].

4. Conclusions

This collection of results from the literature begins to show what type of elements in a person's professional environment need to be taken into consideration to help facilitate flow along with an understanding of the importance of supporting a transference of skills from explicit knowledge systems to implicit procedural systems. The literature appeared to highlight the role of the BG and its related components as a key research direction in which to further explore to enable a greater facilitation of skill automaticity that appears highly related to flow state.

Furthermore, there appears to be support in the literature for a particular neurocognitive activity pattern for flow induction in which expertise and flow studies appear to show a hemispheric shift away from the frontal left evidenced by a resulting reduction of left frontal activity and an increase in frontal alpha while facilitating a greater allocation of neuronal resources to the visual-spatial processes of the right brain, thus resulting in higher levels of performance. Recent interventions such as tDCS have been shown to have a positive effect on the facilitation of flow states that have followed this pattern and with more research may prove to be an effective intervention for real life applications as they are low cost, safe and non-invasive. Due to their simple application, it may be possible to conceive a work environment in which people are working at high levels of productivity with low levels of distractibility from low voltage of electricity.

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

References

56. Fairclough S.H. BCI and physiological computing: Similarities, differences and intuitive control; Proceedings of the Workshop on BCI and Computer Games; Florence, Italy. 5-10 April 2008. [ Google Scholar]

95. Frackowiak R., Friston K., Frith C., Dolan R., Price C., Zeki S. Brain systems mediating reward. Hum. Brain Funct. 2003:445-470. [ Google Scholar]

Articles from Behavioral Sciences are provided here courtesy of Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)

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A Review on the Role of the Neuroscience of Flow States in the Modern World

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Flow states have been shown to help people reach peak performance, yet this elusive state is not easily attained. The review describes the current state of literature on flow by addressing the environmental influences as well as the cognitive and neurocognitive ...

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Have you ever felt truly in the zone, where you were completely engrossed in the task before you? You're dialed in to what needs to be done, and you're cruising through progress. You're checking things off your list, and you feel good about what you're accomplishing.

When that happens, people often say that they're "feeling the flow."

But did you know this phenomenon is formally studied? Recognized and named by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, flow is a state of complete immersion or being totally absorbed in an activity.

In an interview with Wired magazine, Csíkszentmihályi offered this depiction of flow: "The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost."

Imagine if students felt this way on a regular basis. Suppose they became so immersed in their work that their synapses fired at their highest level, and they experienced joy in the learning process.

Sounds ideal, right? But is this even possible?

By adopting a few key changes to your learning process and environment, you can easily provide the right type of space that supports student flow.

Small Changes with Big Impact

Researchers have found that entering a state of flow can improve performance in both teaching and learning. Simple ways to moderate this include:

Teaching: Offer voluntary participation in an activity and a high level of focused attention to help generate flow. Support the activity with well-defined and tangible goals for a task with immediate feedback on performance. Remove distractions and help students focus on the process, not the result.

Learning: Engage activities that help students feel they're being sufficiently challenged yet have the skills needed to accomplish the task. Find success in progress, not perfection. Allow students to feel a sense of timelessness or distorted time to "lose themselves" and fully engage in the task at hand.

In addition to teaching and learning, establishing a state of flow can help enhance performance in other areas such as athletics and creative arts. In fact, flow often takes place during these activities and gives students the agency they need to demonstrate their best skills.

So, how can you bring this all together in your learning environments?

How to Enter the Flow State

For simplification purposes, think of flow as an acronym: Feedback, Learning, Optimization, W orkspaces.

Students feel more motivated when they know they are progressing in the right direction or when they receive suggestions on how to improve. To achieve those ends, feedback is critical.

It's easier to focus intently on an activity and enjoy it when you're sure you're on course toward the goal - or when you're nudged back in the right direction if you stray. Incorporating regular feedback into assignments and activities-as well as embedding tools like whiteboards for students to offer their own feedback-can help students get in a groove.

One aspect of flow that can be harder to achieve in the classroom is choice - completing a task for its own sake rather than out of obligation. To overcome that challenge, embedding personalized learning into the classroom is critical.

Personalization can take the form of offering several assignments for students to work toward the same benchmark. It can also manifest in classroom design. Consider offering different zones for students to learn in, from collaborative worktables to individual study pods to sit-stand desks.

Optimization

Flow can be the outcome when difficulty meets preparation. A comfortable classroom environment can help students balance those competing states.

A welcoming class culture can also make students feel more comfortable. Optimize your classroom physically with warm lighting, intriguing wall art, adaptive chairs and soft lounge seating.

Workspaces

When students are in the flow, schoolwork becomes a breeze. Student workspaces should correspond to support the completion of that work.

Some work may require focus at a personal workstation. Collaborative work might necessitate group tables. Movement-friendly stools can help students get their wiggles out and facilitate the cognitive benefits of movement.

Whether quiet and contemplative or social and collaborative, workspaces that meet student needs and work styles can help them find their flow.

Let it Flow

By supporting flow within learning environments, you can offer substantial benefits to students as well as teachers, including higher levels of happiness, intrinsic motivation, creativity, emotional regulation and more.

Fortunately, even small changes can have a significant impact. With thoughtful curriculum, purposeful culture and strategic design, you can optimize flow in your learning environments today.

Perhaps you're already doing this. How do you facilitate the flow state in your classroom? I'd love to hear from you! Shoot me a message at emily.mcginnis@ki.com.

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Get in the Zone: How to Help Students Find Their Flow

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By adopting a few key changes to your learning process and environment, you can easily provide the right type of space that supports student flow.

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Growing up in World War Two-ravaged Europe, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi saw the adults around him struggling to rebuild their lives - and often losing the will to try. He became preoccupied by a question that doesn't trouble most kids: what makes life worth living?

Csikszentmihalyi moved from Hungary to the US to study psychology and the question that had obsessed him since childhood.

He wondered how wealth fit into the happiness equation, but the data suggested money wasn't the answer; beyond a certain, basic threshold, increases in income hardly affected well-being. So, as he recounted in a TED talk enticingly subtitled The Secret to Happiness, he decided to explore "where in everyday life, in our normal experience, do we feel really happy?".

Csikszentmihalyi thought that creatives - artists, painters, musicians - might have some insight. There must be some reason why they toiled away at projects unlikely to yield fame or fortune. Did something about their process bring them fulfilment? What made their sacrifice worthwhile? One composer told Csikszentmihalyi how, when his work was going well, he experienced a kind of ecstasy. He didn't need to think, he lost track of time and the music would "just flow out". Csikszentmihalyi heard athletes, poets, chess players describe the same phenomenon.

Indeed, there was something special happening. Csikszentmihalyi called this trance-like altered state of total absorption and effortless concentration 'flow'.

That was 40 years ago. Since then Csikszentmihalyi, along with colleagues all over the world, has studied Himalayan climbers, Dominican monks, Navajo shepherds and thousands of others. To all of our good fortune, the researchers have found that 'flow' is not the exclusive realm of artists. In fact, we can experience flow whenever we are fully engaged with our work or hobbies or relationships, in mountains and monasteries alike.
A state of 'flow'
A handful of conditions characterise the 'flow state'.

"There's this focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback," Csikszentmihalyi said in his February 2004 TED talk. "You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger. And once the conditions are present, what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake."

Some people also call this period of hyperfocus 'being in the zone'. Whether you call it 'flow' or 'the zone', it's not just a state of mind. It's accompanied by physiological changes, too. In a 2010 Swedish study on classical pianists, the musicians who entered flow exhibited deepened breathing and slowed heart rates. Even the facial muscles that enable us to smile were activated.

You can be hyperproctive in flow, but don't forget that completing a big project involves a lot more than the ecstatic periods of flow (Credit: Getty Images)

The benefits of being in the zone stretch beyond the experience itself. Flow is associated with subjective well-being, satisfaction with life and general happiness. At work, it's linked to productivity, motivation and company loyalty.

Some people may be naturally prone to flow - especially those who score high on personality tests for conscientiousness and openness to experience, and low on measures of neuroticism. But if you don't experience flow every day, can you find a way to trigger it?
Getting into the zone
First, you must create the optimal conditions to get to your flow state.

"Avoid noisy environments and opportunity for interruptions," advises Giovanni Moneta, an academic psychologist at London Metropolitan University and the author of Positive Psychology: A Critical Introduction.

The activity makes a difference, too. "We need to engage in activities that are meaningful to us, that we find challenging and for which we feel that we have the skills required to come out as winners."

We are more likely to access the flow state when engaged in tasks we've already practiced. Think of the expert figure skater on the rink or the confident singer at the microphone. The level of difficulty should also be just right - not so easy that you find yourself bored, but not so hard that you get stressed.

Of course, that isn't something we can always control. American author Steven Kotler, who wrote a book about peak human performance, has admitted that, as much as we've learned about its biological correlates and mental benefits, " flow is still a happy accident when it happens. All we can do is make you more accident-prone."

And, as Moneta warns, flow can be exhausting. The work involved in completing a big project involves a lot more than the ecstatic, if preternaturally productive, periods of flow. To get to the finish line of a task, it's just as important to slog through the boring parts and push through the uncomfortably difficult ones.
Mindfulness matters
If you're struggling to achieve flow - or just worn out by its intensity - you might aim for mindfulness instead. Think of mindfulness as a more accessible cousin of flow.

"The concepts are very similar," says Ellen Langer, a psychology professor at Harvard who has written several books on mindfulness, creativity and belief. "The major difference is that mindfulness is a state of mind that is available to everybody virtually all the time. It's not an unusual thing."

Almost any activity can be done mindfully - no yoga or meditation necessary (Credit: Alamy)

Mindfulness confers many of the same benefits as flow, she says:

"When people are mindful, their blood pressure comes down. All the physiological signs indicate greater wellbeing. People see you as charismatic. You're healthier, you're happier, your relationships are better. The things you produce are better. We have symphony musicians performing mindfully or in their typical state (over-rehearsed and mindless). We play those pieces for people who don't know anything about the study. Close to 90% prefer the mindfully played piece."

Almost any activity can be done mindfully, too - no yoga or meditation necessary.

"Simply say to yourself, 'What are five new things about this person that I live with, this route that I'm taking home?'. Looking for new in the familiar leads us to be mindful," says Langer. "If you're talking to somebody and you think you know what they're going to say, you barely listen. If you start off recognising that you don't know, you have a very different attitude. Everything becomes more interesting, and if it's interesting, it's naturally engaging."

Someone once asked me, upon learning that I was a writer, whether I "often experienced flow". There's a stereotype that writers and creatives can enter the zone at will - that we sit down at our laptops and the world melts away.

I've been practicing some of the elements of Moneta's criteria to enter the zone for years. But I can remember accessing a state resembling flow only a few times; the vast majority of the hours I spend writing are closer to a grind than a trance. With any project, there are so many variables I can't predict. Will my sources respond? Does the information I seek exist? Will someone send me a text starting 'OMG' to take me away from my focus? Plus, the idea of orchestrating a scenario in which the challenge exceeds my skills by 4% (as Kotler's formula to enter flow recommends) strikes me as absurd.

Mindfulness, though, is more manageable. I can improve my focus by putting my phone in a drawer; when a task seems overwhelming, I can pause and take a breath. I can't say it makes me feel transcendent, but I'll take whatever calm I can get.

--

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The 'flow state': Where creative work thrives

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Growing up in World War Two-ravaged Europe, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi saw the adults around him struggling to rebuild their lives - and often losing the will to try. He became preoccupied by a question that doesn't trouble most kids: what makes life worth living?

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Challenge Island | The World's #1 STEM and STEAM Program

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In the dynamic world of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), creativity is not just an asset; it's a fundamental driving force behind innovation and problem-solving. At Challenge Island, we believe in harnessing the power of creativity to inspire young minds and cultivate the next generation of innovators. Here are three ways creativity is deeply intertwined with STEM education:

Groundbreaking Inventions and Advancements: Creativity in STEM leads to groundbreaking inventions and advancements that shape our world. From the invention of the light bulb to the development of the internet, creative thinkers have revolutionized industries and transformed the way we live. At Challenge Island, we empower students to think boldly and dream big, fostering a culture of innovation where ideas can flourish and new possibilities emerge.

Imaginative Problem-Solving: STEM challenges often present complex problems that require out-of-the-box thinking and innovative solutions. Through our hands-on activities and projects, we encourage students to tap into their imagination and approach problems from multiple perspectives. Whether it's designing a bridge that can withstand a heavy load or creating a Mars rover prototype, creativity fuels the process of problem-solving and empowers students to explore new possibilities.

Collaborative Creativity: Collaboration is key to success in STEM fields, and creativity plays a vital role in fostering effective teamwork. Through our collaborative activities, students learn to communicate their ideas, listen to others, and work together towards a common goal. Whether they're building a robot, coding a computer program, or conducting a science experiment, students discover the power of collective creativity and the synergy that arises when diverse perspectives come together.

At Challenge Island, we believe that creativity is not just a trait; it's a muscle that can be strengthened and cultivated through practice and exploration. By integrating creativity into STEM education, we empower students to become innovative thinkers, problem-solvers, and lifelong learners. Click here and learn more about the endless possibilities of STEM through the power of creativity.

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The Power of Creativity in STEM: 3 Ways Challenge Island Inspires Innovation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the dynamic world of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), creativity is not just an asset; it's a fundamental driving force behind innovation and problem-solving. At Challenge Island, we believe in harnessing the power of creativity to inspire young minds and cultivate the next generation of innovators.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
STEM & Creativity - Skills for the future

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We encourage innovative thinking and creative skills in STEM lessons.Addressing global issues takes more than basic knowledge, which is why we promote creativity and innovation in STEM through Design Thinking and STEAM Regions.

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Christabel Borg Preca, Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing - original draft, Funding acquisition, 1,* Leonie Baldacchino, Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition, ² Marie Briguglio, Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing - review & editing, ³ and Margaret Mangion, Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing - review & editing ²

Abstract

Scholarly research has increasingly examined the role of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education, and that of creativity as a transversal skill. However, far fewer studies have investigated the relationship between the two, particularly in secondary-school contexts, and they have obtained inconsistent results. This paper contributes to the literature by asking: To what extent is studying STEM associated with higher levels of creativity in a secondary-school context? The study utilises a pre-existing dataset gathered in Malta (EU) from some 400 students aged between 11 and 16 years old. It yields information on both the engagement in STEM (measured by exposure to STEM chosen by students as optional subjects, and the enjoyment of STEM considered by students to be their favourite subjects), as well as creativity levels (measured by Divergent Thinking performance on Alternate Uses Tests). Correlation analysis revealed a strong positive link between the two phenomena, lending support to the notion that STEM students tend to be more creative than other students. Using regression analysis, a model is estimated to identify the possible effects of engaging in STEM subjects on creativity, once the other co-determinants of creativity are controlled. The results indicate that both the exposure to STEM subject/s and enjoyment thereof significantly and positively predict creativity, even after controlling for the other possible determinants of creativity (such as age, gender, parental education, and participation in creative activities). These findings offer encouraging insights into 21st century education and for curriculum development as they suggest that, in addition to having value in their own right, STEM subjects can contribute to the development of creativity in young people.

Keywords: STEM, creativity, divergent thinking, 21st century skills, secondary education

1. Introduction

In recent years, there have been considerable efforts among educators and policymakers to promote science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects and careers, as they are considered by many to play a key role in boosting economic competitiveness, productivity, and innovation ( Collard and Looney 2014; European Commission 2009; Runco 2010). STEM education is often linked to economic competitiveness, as it is believed to contribute to workforce-ready individuals ( Bentley et al. 2022). Indeed, STEM-related jobs are among the fastest-growing jobs in the labour market. Within the European Union (EU), the number of people working in STEM-related fields increased by 12% between 2003 and 2013. To date, STEM accounts for 7% of the total occupations within the EU. STEM occupations are also among the highest-paying sectors ( Melguizo and Wolniak 2012) and are associated with improved economic, social, and personal wellbeing ( Beede et al. 2011).

In parallel, there has been an increasing understanding of the importance of creativity as a transversal 21st century skill ( Partnership for 21st Century Learning 2015; Voogt and Roblin 2012). Creativity typically refers to the generation of ideas that are novel, original, or unique, as well useful, appropriate, or contextually relevant ( Amabile et al. 1996; El Murad and West 2004; Runco and Jaeger 2012). Creativity is increasingly considered to be a crucial competency ( Marrone et al. 2022) for economic and social development. Yet, while STEM and creativity are both observed as important skill sets, a question remains as to whether one comes at the cost of the other.

Traditionally, the Arts and Humanities were considered to be linked to creativity and, in particular, divergent thinking (DT), which involves the generation of multiple ideas or solutions related to a task or situation ( Cropley 2006). The Sciences, on the other hand, tend to be associated more with convergent thinking, in the sense of tackling problems by providing a single optimal solution ( Cropley 2006). Indeed, during his influential 'Rede Lecture', titled 'The Two Cultures', in 1959, scientist and novelist C.P. Snow highlighted a division between the Humanities and Sciences. This has since triggered scholarly curiosity as to whether there is a difference in thinking styles across domains ( Furnham et al. 2011).

A number of researchers have since sought to examine the links between STEM subjects and creativity, with inconsistent results. Studies by Furnham et al. ( 2011), van Broekhoven et al. ( 2020), and Williamson ( 2011) all indicate that there are no differences in creative thinking abilities between students from different disciplines. Stylianidou et al. ( 2018), on the other hand, suggest that science education in the early years may enhance creativity. There therefore remains an unresolved question regarding whether there is any relationship, positive or negative, between engaging in STEM education and creativity.

2. Theoretical Background

2.1. STEM Education

STEM education is a complex and poorly defined field ( Li et al. 2020) that has been the focus of an increasing body of research since 2000 ( Kayan-Fadlelmula et al. 2022; Li et al. 2020; Li and Xiao 2022). What started as an acronym, bringing together the four core subjects of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, has changed considerably over the years ( Dare et al. 2019; Martín-Páez et al. 2019), to the extent that Breiner et al. ( 2012) argue that STEM education holds different meanings to different stakeholders. Tytler ( 2020) notes that the STEM acronym is underpinned by the notion that it collectively comprises "a coherent package of subjects that cover the knowledge and skills around the sciences, applied sciences, and the digital world that constitute the driving force towards a post-industrial global future and the future wealth of countries" (p. 22).

2.2. Creativity Education

At the same time, there is broad agreement in academia and industry about the need for skills that are transversal, multidimensional, and associated with higher-order cognitive processes, in order to deal with problems that are complex and diverse ( Brown et al. 2010). Foremost, among such skills is creativity ( Partnership for 21st Century Learning 2015). A number of studies focus on nurturing creativity in educational contexts. For instance, Briguglio et al. ( 2022) identify the impact of a school-based educational programme in secondary-school contexts, finding that, while creativity levels generally decreased between the start and end of the school year, students exposed to a programme with creative practitioners fared better. The same study also found that parental education has a positive effect on creativity.

2.3. The Relationship between STEM and Creativity

While there has been considerable scholarly attention paid to both STEM and creativity separately, there is a wide scope to examine the link between the two. Learning methods and thinking styles that prevail in the Sciences have traditionally been believed to differ from the ones in the Arts and Humanities. Specifically, individuals who are attracted to the Sciences are considered to prefer convergent thinking, while those who gravitate towards the Arts and Humanities are assumed to prefer creativity and DT ( Furnham et al. 2011). However, empirical studies have contradicted these assumptions. For example, Williamson ( 2011) found only minor differences in learning styles and no significant differences in problem-solving behaviour among undergraduate students from different domains. Furnham et al. ( 2011) also found no significant differences in DT fluency, creative judgement, or achievement between Arts and Science undergraduate students. Similar results were obtained by van Broekhoven et al. ( 2020) who found no significant differences in creativity between university students specialising in the Arts or STEM-related fields.

Furthermore, some authors (e.g., Root-Bernstein et al. 2008) suggest that there is actually a positive link between scientific success and ability within artistic domains, as noted in polymaths who excel in a variety of disciplines, including the Sciences and Arts. Indeed, it may also be argued that creativity can be developed through STEM subjects ( Zhbanova 2019). Sánchez et al. ( 2022) consider creativity to emerge from processes that are essential in Science and Mathematics activities. This suggests that STEM may play an indirect role in the development of creativity by facilitating these processes. In support of this, Schoevers et al. ( 2020) found that mathematical ability and the ability to generate ideas influenced mathematical creativity among fourth graders. Stylianidou et al. ( 2018) also found that the focus on problem-solving activity and agency in STEM has a positive impact on student creativity.

It is worth noting that much of the research on the relationship between STEM and creativity in educational settings has been at a tertiary level ( van Broekhoven et al. 2020; Furnham et al. 2011; Williamson 2011), possibly because of a greater distinction of the subjects studied and greater clarity concerning the choice of specialisation at this level.

2.4. Synthesis, Research Question, and Hypotheses

In summary, there seems to be little disagreement in the literature that both STEM subjects and creativity are important skills to be nurtured in an educational context. However, the results are inconsistent as to whether there is a positive effect of nurturing creativity for STEM performance and whether there is a positive effect from engaging in STEM on creativity itself. Moreover, the extant research on the relationship between STEM and creativity in educational settings has largely occurred at post-secondary-, tertiary-, and, to a lesser extent, early school settings, with far less evidence being obtained from a secondary-school level (pre-college age).

Against this backdrop, this study focuses on the first relationship and asks the following research question: To what extent is studying STEM associated with higher levels of creativity in a secondary-school context? More specifically, we set out to assess, against the null hypothesis (H0) of zero association, the alternative hypothesis that students who learn STEM subjects demonstrate a higher level of creativity, as measured by DT. We test this hypothesis in two ways: firstly by assessing whether students who choose STEM subjects demonstrate greater creativity, thereby capturing the effect of exposure to STEM subjects (H1a), and secondly, by assessing whether students who consider STEM subjects to be their favourite subjects exhibit higher levels of creativity, thereby capturing the effect of the enjoyment of STEM subjects (H1b). We test our hypotheses in the milieu of a Maltese secondary-school environment. This context and the method adopted are described in the following section.

3. Materials and Methods

3.1. Context of the Study

The context of this study was Malta, a European Union (EU) small island state with a population of approximately 500,000 people. Compulsory schooling in Malta is between the ages of 5 and 16 years old, and students may attend one of three types of schools, namely, state, church, and independent schools. State schools attract a particular geographic catchment, as stipulated by the boundaries set for the different districts, while church and independent schools attract students from all over the island. Although there are variations in the management and teaching policies across the types of schools, they are all required to follow the same curriculum with a generally homogeneous teaching practice, as regulated by the National Education Act (CAP 327).

At the end of Year 8, students (aged 11-13 years) choose a number of optional academic, vocational, or applied subjects that would lead them to a Matriculation and Secondary Education Certificate (MATSEC)-an entry requirement for post-secondary education. At this time, they continue to study core subjects (English, Maltese, Mathematics, Religious Studies/Ethics, and Personal, Social, and Career Development), and they supplement these with optional subjects. These optional subjects include a range of academic, vocational, and applied subjects. Among them, and of particular interest to this study, were those identified as STEM subjects by the Maltese authorities ( European Schoolnet 2018), namely, Health and Social Care, Engineering, Technology, Information Technology, Computing, Design and Technology, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, Graphical Communication, and Agribusiness. All schools in Malta offer STEM-related subjects at the secondary level.

3.2. Data Collection

To address the research question, this study performed a statistical analysis of pre-existing survey data that were gathered in 2016 as part of a larger research project commissioned by the Arts Council Malta (see also Briguglio et al. 2022). Although a few years have elapsed since the data were gathered, there have been no major changes to the curriculum related to STEM or creativity since then. The topics remain highly relevant to stakeholders in Malta, including educators, researchers, and policymakers. A subset of the data collected was suitable to test this study's hypotheses and was shared with the present authors, following approval by the Arts Council Malta. An overview of the original data collection procedure is provided below for the sake of completeness.

The research sample was that of 400 students, broadly and evenly distributed by gender and aged between 11 and 16 years. The students were recruited from nine secondary schools in Malta (five state, two church, and two independent schools), all of which were originally identified by the Arts Council on the basis that they were beneficiaries of a state-funded creativity programme, they represented different school types, and they agreed to participate in the research. Participation by students in the study was voluntary and entailed the signing of consent forms by their legal guardians. Teachers were provided with written and verbal instructions to ensure that the data collection instruments were administered in a consistent manner. The original data collection was covered by ethics and data protection clearances, and permission to use the unpublished secondary data as well as ethics and data protection clearances were obtained by the present authors.

The data were gathered by means of a paper-based questionnaire, distributed by teachers to students in their classrooms at the start of the school year, in October 2016. It is pertinent to note that this constituted an initial round of data collection prior to the implementation of the above-mentioned creativity funding programme. It took students an average of 20 min to complete the entire questionnaire. The content of the questionnaire included, inter alia, i. measures of creativity, ii. measures of engagement in STEM, iii. measures of engagement in creative activities, and iv. demographic and other data.

As in other studies, creativity was operationalised by measuring the capacity to produce new ideas through DT-a key indicator of creativity ( Doron 2016). In this regard, Guilford et al.'s ( 1960) Alternate Uses Test (AUT) was employed, involving the generation of multiple ideas or solutions to a given task or problem. Two such tests were assigned at the very beginning of the questionnaire, where participants were asked to think of as many uses as they could for a sock and a box, within a time limit of three minutes per object.

The data related to STEM studies were gathered in the original survey by asking students the following questions: 'Which optional subjects have you chosen at school? (circle any)' (to measure exposure to STEM subjects) and 'Think of ALL your school subjects. Which is your favourite?' (to measure enjoyment of STEM subjects). The questionnaire also gathered data related to the participants' background, such as age, gender, and parental education, as these were identified in the previous research as relevant co-determinants of creative outcomes ( Briguglio et al. 2022; Shah and Gustafsson 2020). As a further control to understand the diversity in creativity, the questionnaire also asked students about their participation in school-based and extra-curricular creative activities. This was measured by means of an adaptation of Batey's ( 2007) Biographical Inventory of Creative Behaviours (BICB), namely, limiting the options to 15 items known to be relevant in Malta (e.g., writing a short story, producing a picture, or creating a sculpture). Students were asked to mark any activities that they had been involved in. Composite scores of creative activities were then created by adding up the number of items that participants reported engaging in during school hours and during their free time in the preceding month. The number of activities chosen were subsequently collapsed into two indices-one for creative activities conducted at school and one for creative activities conducted in free time.

3.3. Data Preparation and Analysis

Responses to the AUT DT test were scored by two tenured academics at a higher-education institution, knowledgeable in creativity theory, research, and practice. Indices of creativity were created, including ideational fluency (the number of ideas generated), flexibility (the number of conceptual categories into which the ideas may fit), elaboration (the amount of detail provided to communicate the ideas), originality (the uniqueness of the ideas) (e.g., Gu et al. 2019; Runco 2010; Yi et al. 2015), relevance, appropriateness or feasibility ( Baruah et al. 2021), and novelty ( Amabile et al. 1996; El Murad and West 2004; Runco and Jaeger 2012). Inter-rater reliability, which was estimated by Pearson's Bivariate Correlations, was strong ( r > .7; p < .001) or moderate ( r = .5-.7, p < .01), and all points of divergence between the raters were resolved.

On the basis of the data available, the researchers were able to create an index of exposure to STEM subjects and another of enjoyment of STEM subjects. There being no a priori reason to weight the STEM subjects, all of them were provided with equal weighting. To compress and simplify the data by extracting the most important information from a data table ( Abdi and Williams 2010), Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was performed, thereby deriving an overall score for creativity (i.e., dependent variable) that encompassed all the above-mentioned creativity indices for both items in the DT test (sock and box).

Table 1 presents the dataset that was used for this study. As can be observed, the 400 students were aged between 11 and 16 years with a mean age of just over 13.5 years. Just over half the sample students were female, and just over half had parents whose highest level of education was tertiary (university). Students undertook an average of 4 to 5 out of 14 creative activities at school and around 5 out of 14 possible activities in their free time. Their creativity scores ranged from 0 to 1, with a mean of 0.5. Just over two-thirds of the students chose at least one STEM subject as an optional subject with responses ranging from zero to five; however, only around one-third of the students named a STEM subject as their favourite.

Table 1

Responses (N)

Minimum

Maximum

Mean

Standard
Deviation

Creativity

STEM engagement

STEM exposure
(STEM optional subjects chosen)

400

0

5

1.4

1.1

STEM enjoyment
(STEM favourite subjects)

400

0

3

0.3

0.5

Co-determinants of creativity

The Results Section starts with a simple description of the data, assessing the students' engagement in STEM subjects, followed by a basic analysis by gender. A correlation analysis then followed to test the links between engagement in STEM subjects and creative activities or creativity scores. Recognising that correlation does not indicate causality (other variables may have influenced the relationship), Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions were performed in order to estimate the strength of the associations between variables ( Hutcheson 1999), parsing out the effect of co-determinants. There are three components of an OLS, namely, "a random component for the response variable, which is assumed to be normally distributed, a systematic component representing the fixed values of the explanatory variables in terms of a linear function, and finally, a link function which maps the systematic component onto the random component" ( Hutcheson 1999, p. 2).

In this study, the response (dependent) variable is the PCA creativity score, the explanatory (independent) variables are the STEM subjects, and the link function includes the important correlates of creativity measures (including age, gender, education level of parents, and creative activity during school hours or free time). Prior to running the regressions, the normality of the dependent variables was tested using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. This revealed that the measures of creativity were non-parametric. Logarithmic transformations were therefore conducted prior to using them in the regression models. The statistical analysis was performed using International Business Machines Statistical Package for Social Sciences (IBM SPSS) software.

4. Results

4.1. Preliminary Analysis

The data analysis revealed that most students in the sample had some exposure to STEM, as they chose at least one STEM subject as an optional subject ( Table 2 ). The three most popular STEM subjects are Biology ( n = 111), Physics ( n = 87), and Graphical Communication ( n = 80), whereas the least popular are Engineering ( n = 3), Technology ( n = 5), and Agribusiness ( n = 6).

While most students had some exposure to STEM, the same cannot be said regarding the enjoyment of STEM, as 64.8% of the sample ( n = 259) did not name any STEM subjects as being their favourite subject. One third of the sample (33.7%, n = 135) named one STEM subject as their favourite, while only 2.5% of the sample ( n = 6) named two or three STEM subjects as their favourite ( Table 3 ). The most common favourite STEM subjects were Biology ( n = 40), Mathematics ( n = 39), and Computing ( n = 21), while the least popular were Technology and Engineering ( n = 0) Health and Social Care ( n = 1), and Design and Technology ( n = 1).

When comparing students' gender and exposure to STEM, it was evident that STEM subjects were more popular among boys than girls in our sample ( Figure 1 ). Notably, many more girls (38%, n = 84) than boys (13.6%, n = 24) chose no STEM subjects as optional subjects. Similarly, more girls (27.1%, n = 60) than boys (26.1%, n = 46) chose only one optional STEM subject. Conversely, more boys (40.9%, n = 72; 16.5%, n = 29; 2.8%, n = 5) than girls (26.2%, n = 58; 7.2%, n = 16; 0.9%, n = 2) chose two, three, or four optional STEM subjects. A chi-squared test (10, N = 399) = 39.31, p < .001 confirmed that the association between gender and exposure to STEM subjects was statistically significant.

When comparing students' gender and their enjoyment of STEM subjects, it was again evident that STEM subjects were appreciated more by boys than girls ( Figure 2 ). Most female students (77.8%, n = 172) named no STEM subjects as their favourite, in contrast to half the male students in the sample (49.9%, n = 87) who reported that their favourite subject was from the STEM category. A chi-squared test (6, N = 399) = 39.93, p < .001 confirmed that the association between gender and enjoyment of STEM subjects was statistically significant.

4.2. Correlation Analysis

Since many of the variables were non-parametric, a Spearman's Rank Order Correlation was performed. As shown in Table 4 , a significant positive correlation can be noted between the engagement of students in STEM subjects (be it as a choice of optional subject or as their favourite subject) and creativity scores (measured as a PCA score). There was some support for both H1a and H1b that a positive link existed between the exposure to STEM subjects and creativity ( r = .264, p < .01) and between the enjoyment of STEM subjects and creativity ( r = .159, p < .01).

The correlation results, however, also indicate that there is a significant link between creativity and gender ( r = −.185, p < .01), creativity and parental education ( r = .239, p < .01), and creativity and participation in creative activities performed at school ( r = .160, p < .01) and during free time ( r = .211, p < .01). Therefore, it was difficult to determine whether the link between STEM and creativity was driven by, perhaps, a gender effect (more boys chose STEM, and boys scored better for creativity) or a parental-education effect (highly educated parents were linked to greater STEM exposure and creativity levels). For this purpose, we turned to a regression analysis.

4.3. Regression Analysis

OLS regressions were performed to identify whether changes in creativity scores may be attributed to the study of STEM subjects. The variables included in the OLS models were selected on the basis of past research, including Briguglio et al. ( 2022). The multiple regression employed the creativity (PCA scores) as the main dependent variable in order to provide a general view of the effect of STEM subjects on overall creativity. Three models were run. The first employed a base model to forecast the creative outcomes (PCA scores). This model included three key demographic variables (age, gender, and parental education), as well as engagement in creative activities (based on the indices constructed) as predictor variables. The second model added 'STEM Exposure' as an independent variable while the third model replaced this with 'STEM Enjoyment'. Table 5 shows the results of these three models. All Tolerance values were above .10, and the Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) values were less than 10, indicating that there were no multicollinearity issues.

The results displayed in column 1 show that the base model is significant ( R ² = 0.120, F = 10.486, p < .001). Gender was found to be negatively associated with creativity ( B = −0.041, p < .01), which implies that male students outperformed their female counterparts on the DT tests, once all other factors were controlled for. As expected from the previous literature (e.g., Briguglio et al. 2022), the level of education of the students' parents had a positive effect on their creativity ( B = 0.032, p < .001). Participation in creative activities during the students' free time also had a significant positive effect on creativity ( B = 0.007, p < .01), while participation in creative activities at school had no additional significant effect.

The regression was repeated with the addition of 'STEM Exposure' as an independent variable to test H1a. This model, shown in column 2, was significant ( R ² = 0.135, F = 9.895, p < .001) and was improved as a result of adding the independent variable to the base model. This independent variable was observed to have a positive effect on creativity ( B = 0.017, p < .05), which indicates that the more optional STEM subjects students chose, the more likely they were to perform better in terms of creativity. This offers support for H1a.

To further test our expectations, the regression was conducted again, this time with 'STEM Enjoyment' as an independent variable to test H1b. As shown in column 3, the model significance was slightly stronger than the previous model ( R ² = 0.135, F = 9.914, p < .001), and it was once again an improvement on the base model. The impact of STEM as a favourite subject/s was positive and significant and twice as large as that of STEM as optional subject/s ( B = 0.038, p < .05). This shows that students who indicated more STEM subjects as their favourites obtained higher creativity scores, thereby supporting H1b.

Taken together, these findings suggest a rejection of the null hypothesis (H0) that stipulates that there is no association between the engagement in STEM learning and creativity. On the contrary, whether measured by the exposure to or enjoyment of STEM subjects, the engagement in STEM subjects was positively associated with creativity, as measured by DT. Furthermore, the results suggest that, among students who considered STEM subjects to be their favourite subjects, creativity scores are even higher. These results are derived after controlling for co-determinants of DT, including age, gender, and parental-education level, as well as engagement in creative activities at school and in their free time.

To test for the robustness of our results, regression analyses were repeated with all the individual DT indices as dependent variables. The analysis confirmed our findings: the propensity to indicate STEM subjects as favourite subjects is positively associated with all the indices. Choosing STEM subjects as optional subjects was positively linked to elaboration (the amount of detail), originality (uniqueness), and novelty, but not significantly related to fluency (the number of ideas generated) or flexibility (the number of conceptual categories into which the ideas may fit). For ease of reference, the results are summarised in Table 6 by displaying the coefficients and respective standard errors of the main variables.

5. Discussion

The main aim of this study was to explore the extent to which studying STEM subjects in secondary-school was associated with creativity levels. Although previous research has investigated the relationship between creativity and different domains of knowledge, including the Arts and STEM subjects (e.g., Furnham et al. 2011; Stylianidou et al. 2018; van Broekhoven et al. 2020; Williamson 2011), the results are inconsistent, leaving an unresolved issue regarding the relationship between STEM and creativity. Moreover, previous research on this relationship has largely focused on post-secondary- ( Li and Xiao 2022), tertiary- ( van Broekhoven et al. 2020; Furnham et al. 2011; Williamson 2011), and, to a lesser extent, early education levels ( Stylianidou et al. 2018), leaving a gap in the knowledge concerning this question in the context of secondary-school (pre-college-age students). This study attempted to address the gap in the research by investigating the relationship between students' engagement in STEM at secondary-school and their creativity levels (measured by DT scores). It did this by exploring both the impact of exposure to STEM (choosing STEM subjects as optional subjects/s) and the enjoyment of STEM (considering STEM subjects as a favourite subject/s).

Guided by the extant literature, a parsimonious model was employed that sought to predict creativity by age, gender, parental education, and involvement in creative activities at school and during free time. Subsequently, the model was re-estimated with additional test variables that captured students' exposure to STEM and their enjoyment of STEM subjects. Our key finding is that both exposure to STEM as optional subject/s and enjoyment of STEM as a favourite subject/s significantly and positively predict creativity outcomes, thus offering more support for our hypotheses. We believe that these findings contribute to the literature on the links between STEM and the development of transversal skills (e.g., Froschauer 2015; Sánchez et al. 2022; Stylianidou et al. 2018; Zhbanova 2019). Furthermore, they support the previous research on the complementarity of STEM and creativity (e.g., Root-Bernstein et al. 2008; Sánchez et al. 2022; Schoevers et al. 2020; Stylianidou et al. 2018; Zhbanova 2019).

Further detailed regression analyses revealed that exposure to STEM as optional subjects was significantly associated with overall creativity, elaboration, originality, and novelty, but not with fluency, flexibility, or relevance. On the other hand, students who enjoyed STEM subjects-so much that they considered them their favourite subject/s-demonstrated significantly higher creativity levels for all of the six indices (fluency, flexibility, elaboration, originality, novelty, and relevance). Intrinsic motivation-a factor linked with creativity ( Amabile 1996) could be at play. The finding hints at the importance of schools offering relevant and motivating STEM experiences that not only entice students to choose STEM subjects, but also result in their enjoyment of these subjects. Initiatives, such as co-curricular STEM clubs within schools, allow students the flexibility to experiment, explore, and apply STEM to projects they are personally invested in. Initiatives can promote the application of STEM skills, such as science fairs and competitions. As Peppler and Wohlwend ( 2018) argue, creativity itself can facilitate the engagement in these subjects as it makes subjects intrinsically more approachable and relatable.

This latter notion of engagement is also important in the discourse relating to equity. It is noteworthy that our findings reveal that girls are considerably less likely to study STEM subjects as optional or favourite subject/s in Malta. Many countries have attempted to target this gender gap in STEM education and employment. Common strategies include informal programmes targeting underrepresented groups and industry-led campaigns in formal- and informal-education settings. Initiatives to promote equitable STEM education could look at engaging females through a holistic approach, which includes different stakeholders from the public, private, academic, and tertiary sectors.

Although the relationship between studying STEM subjects and creativity clearly emerges from this study, it is important to consider some of the limitations in the method. The main limitations relate to the identification of the key variables (STEM engagement and creativity), the sampling frame, and the cross-sectional nature of the data.

With the data available, it was not possible to control for students' prior STEM education, nor for any differences in STEM experiences outside school. It was also not possible to control for the quality of the STEM experience that they received-the dataset did not contain any information related to the pedagogical approach in schools, nor was it possible to estimate the models for individual schools. Such issues could be tackled in future research where data collection can permit detailed questions to be asked. On the other hand, we believe that the study offers a novel contribution to distinguishing between the choice of STEM subjects as an optional subject and the enjoyment of STEM subjects as a favourite topic.

With regards to the measurement of creativity, the study employed data that were generated using Guilford et al.'s ( 1960) AUT as a creativity measure. Although they are not perfectly analogous ( Runco 2010), DT tests are widely used by creativity researchers (e.g., Gu et al. 2019) as they provide estimates of creative potential, ideation, and everyday problem-solving tasks. It is well known that the test does not necessarily account for all the skills related to creativity, but that it mainly reveals DT skills. The fact that the test involves a systematic enquiry might resonate more closely with the systematic thinking approach used in scientific enquiry, thereby favouring students of scientific subjects. In subsequent studies, this could be investigated by using different tests and measures of creativity.

A different set of limitations pertain to the sample. The dataset was gathered from schools that opted into a government-funded creativity programme. This suggests that they were already inclined to include topics related to creativity within their curricula or pedagogy, and that students' exposure to creativity may be greater than the exposure of students in other schools. With this said, there was no reason for this to bias the results in relation to the differences observed between STEM students and others. A related limitation pertains to the cross-sectional nature of the data. Future research could adopt a longitudinal approach to explore the causal effects of STEM engagement on creativity over time. This, together with a more nuanced measure of STEM engagement, a wider set of measures for creativity, and a broader range of schools would constitute an improvement to this study.

6. Conclusions

This study provided evidence that the study of STEM is linked with higher levels of divergent thinking. This was determined through the OLS regression analysis using a sample of 400 students aged between 11 and 16 years. Considering that schools have generally invested in developing their STEM capacity, but are often criticised for inadequately nurturing transversal skills, these findings offer encouraging insights into 21st century education, as they suggest that, in addition to having value in their own right, STEM subjects may also contribute to the development of creativity in young people.

Acknowledgments

Gratitude is due to Liberato Camilleri, Gilmore Camilleri and Melchior Vella for assisting in the data analysis.

Funding Statement

The data utilized in this paper were funded by the Arts Council Malta (project number E16LG94-01). The study was also partially funded by the Endeavour Scholarship Scheme (Malta), which was part-financed by the European Union-European Social Fund (ESF)-Operational Programme II-Cohesion Policy 2014-2020 "Investing in human capital to create more opportunities and promote the well-being of society". Neither of these funding bodies had any role in the analysis or interpretation of the data, in the writing of the paper, or in the decision to submit it for publication.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, C.B.P., L.B., M.B. and M.M.; Methodology, C.B.P., L.B., M.B. and M.M.; Formal analysis, C.B.P., L.B., M.B. and M.M.; Investigation, C.B.P., L.B., M.B. and M.M.; Writing-original draft, C.B.P. and L.B.; Writing-review & editing, L.B., M.B. and M.M.; Supervision, L.B.; Funding acquisition, C.B.P. and L.B. All authors contributed equally to this study. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Institutional Review Board Statement

The study utilised data that were gathered in accordance with the University of Malta's Research Ethics Review Procedures, and was approved by the Faculty of Economics, Management and Accountancy Research Ethics Committee (protocol code 05371, approved on the 26 May 2020). Given that the original data collection involved children in schools, ethics clearance was also requested and obtained from the Malta Ministry for Education and Employment.

Informed Consent Statement

All the students (minors) involved in this study gave their assent to participate, after full informed consent was obtained from their legal guardians. Permission from the schools was also obtained prior to the study.

Data Availability Statement

The study utilised secondary data Requests for access to the original data may be made via the corresponding author.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Footnotes

Disclaimer/Publisher's Note: The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.

References

Beede David N., Julian Tiffany A., Langdon David, McKittrick George, Khan Beethika, Doms Mark E. Women in STEM: A gender gap to innovation. Economics and Statistics Administration. 2011 doi: 10.2139/ssrn.1964782. [[CrossRef] Google Scholar]

Beghetto Ronald A., Madison Ed. Accepting the challenge: Helping schools get smarter about supporting students' creative collaboration and communication in a changing world. Journal of Intelligence. 2022;10:80. doi: 10.3390/jintelligence10040080. [[PMC free article] [PubMed] [CrossRef] Google Scholar]

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Lubart Todd, Kharkhurin Anatoliy V., Corazza Giovanni Emanuele, Besançon Maud, Yagolkovskiy Sergey R., Sak Ugur. Creative potential in science: Conceptual and measurement issues. Frontiers in Psychology. 2022;13:750224. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.750224. [[PMC free article] [PubMed] [CrossRef] Google Scholar]

Marrone Rebecca, Taddeo Victoria, Hill Gillian. Creativity and artificial intelligence-A student perspective. Journal of Intelligence. 2022;10:65. doi: 10.3390/jintelligence10030065. [[PMC free article] [PubMed] [CrossRef] Google Scholar]

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Voogt Joke, Roblin Natalie Pareja. A comparative analysis of international frameworks for 21[st century competences: Implications for national curriculum policies. Journal of Curriculum Studies. 2012;44:299-321. doi: 10.1080/00220272.2012.668938. [CrossRef] Google Scholar]

Articles from Journal of Intelligence are provided here courtesy of Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)

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Scholarly research has increasingly examined the role of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education, and that of creativity as a transversal skill. However, far fewer studies have investigated the relationship between the two, ...

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In the Preschool Years, Success is Child's Play

The year was 2009; I was living in the City by the Bay. Having just moved, I was surrounded by baby stuff and unpacked boxes. My first kid was about to turn 3, and my second was still swinging on my ribs and kicking my bladder from the inside.

Next up on my "to-do" list was finding a preschool for my oldest, so I started asking other local parents of toddlers what preschools they were considering for their little ragamuffins. The general response was that I was late to the party. Years too late.

Apparently, I had missed the part of my prenatal classes when they told us we should add our progeny to preschool waitlists immediately, preferably while still in-utero. And, not just any waitlists, the RIGHT waitlists, for the RIGHT preschools, that would feed into the RIGHT elementary school, that would cement a spot for our future genius at Harvard.

They were serious. So, of course, I did what every good parent would do in that situation: I panicked. I spiraled into an abyss of despair, thinking I had already ruined my kid's entire life!

As I emerged from that foggy hole of self-doubt and shame, I started to remember three things.

1. I happen to be a pediatric occupational therapist, specializing in infant and child development.

2. I'm pretty sure that preschool does not have the sole power to make or break a kid's whole life.

3. We can't afford Harvard.

Backing away from the ledge, I started to look at preschools through my lens as an occupational therapist. What I saw was that academic rigor was all the rage. Toddlers were seen as little sponges, to be sat down and drowned in as much information as humanly possible, as early as possible.

Parents, with the best of intentions, wanted more learning, more "extras" at younger ages to ensure their children wouldn't be left behind (hello parenting anxiety). We're talking language classes, kindergarten readiness skills, math, handwriting, science, cursive, worksheets, even homework. It was all on the table, albeit tiny little sticky tables.

Preschool: A Lay of the Land

Before we go further, it will help to define some vocab.

Daycare is a broad term that covers all child care outside the home from 0 through 5 years of age. Preschool is generally intended for 3 to 5 year olds and provides early childhood education before kindergarten. Pre-k typically denotes the final year of preschool before kindergarten and is tailored to 4 to 5 year olds. In many preschools, the classrooms and expectations of the older preschoolers start to look more and more like elementary school classrooms.

There are a slew of different philosophies that schools use to guide their programs which seems really confusing, but they basically fall into two categories: Play-based & Academic. These lie on a continuum from less structured (child-directed) to more structured (adult-directed).

The occupational therapist in me did not love the idea of the more structured, academic-style preschools. Young children being asked to sit still and learn for long periods of time just seemed like a bad idea. Most 3-year-olds have a hard time sitting still long enough for a good pee, much less for a 15-minute lecture on anything.

All of my knowledge and learning about human development screamed that children learn best through active free-play. Sincethe body and brain are interconnected, children need both physical movement and hands-on experiences in order to learn. This means they work harder to overcome obstacles, are more engaged, problem solve more creatively, and learn more innately when an activity is desired and fun! Let's be honest, adults learn best this way too. And yet, in schools nationwide, we keep expecting our kids to learn by sitting still and listening.

I knew all of this logically, but despite my years of experience working in child development, the trap of thinking that doing less meant I was not doing enough as a parent had a pull like a siren song. (To be honest, parenting anxiety still plagues me.)

In the 1990s - early 2000s, it was generally held that children who attended preschool were better prepared for kindergarten - and would perform better throughout kindergarten - than the kids who didn't. Additional studies had hypothesized that preschool might also improve long-term outcomes for children.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University wanted to do a more comprehensive study that looked at both short-term and long-term outcomes of attending preschool. Turns out, there was the makings for a perfectly designed study right there in their own state...

The state of Tennessee has had a voluntary public Pre-K program (TN-VPK) since the late 90's. Early indicators pointed to its success, as it'd scored very well using established benchmarks of quality at that time. In 2005, the program expanded rapidly and was rolled out across the state, thanks to an influx of funding.

But the program was over-enrolled, meaning there were more children than spaces available in many neighborhoods. This led to assignment by lottery, where children from similar neighborhoods with similar family needs were randomly chosen to attend the TN-VPK, or not. Researchers saw an opportunity to use these preschools for a research study design called a randomized controlled trial (RTC): the gold standard of research!

The children who attended TN-VPK in the 2009-10 school year were the test group, the children who didn't attend were the control group. In the years since, both groups have been followed (in a non-creepy way) and tested repeatedly from Pre-K through their 8th grade year to see the short-term and long-term effects of the TN-VPK program (they'll ultimately be followed through high school).

So, the design of this study was quite good. The problem is, the outcomes (so far) have been mind-blowing!

And by that, we mean bad. Really bad.

Here are the results of the study so far, in a nutshell:

The short-term results were positive: the group who attended the TN-VPK scored better on academic measures by the beginning of kindergarten than the group who didn't get in. High fives all around!

Sadly, this marks the end of the success for this group. By the end of the kindergarten year, the Pre-K students' advantage had almost completely disappeared. This wasn't really a surprise, as previous studies had shown that early successes had similarly diminished by the end of K.

But wait, there's more.

A disturbing pattern began to emerge over the next few years. When the kids were tested after 3rd grade, and again after 6th grade, the lottery "winners" (aka: academic Pre-K attenders), progressively scored worse than the lottery "losers" in almost all academic behavioral areas tested.

To be clear, the group that attended the highly structured, academic Pre-K tested lower in science, lower in reading, and lower in math by the end of 3rd grade with the gap growing wider by the end of 6th grade.

They also had more behavioral and discipline problems, which also progressively got worse over the years.

And, the most surprising finding in this slew of surprising findings was that they ended up with a greater need for special education services. The irony of this was that one of the goals of this program was specifically to reduce referrals to special ed.

What went wrong?

The study is still ongoing and there is a lot to unpack for future review, but it is very possible that the academic nature of thispreschool program is what went so wrong.

The TN-VPK was a full-day program that (by design) required a minimum of 5 ½ hours of instructional time a day, 5 days a week. Yep, you read that right, the 4-year-olds in this program were expected to follow adult direction and "learn" for a minimum of five and a half hours a day. So, with their probable 2 hour nap time, snacks and lunch, this left little time for free-play. According to my definition, I would consider this program to be a highly structured academic preschool.

In contrast, most (63%) of the control group (those kids who lost the lottery to attend), just stayed home with their families until kindergarten and attended no preschool at all. The home environment is usually less structured and allows for lots of free-play time. Some of the control group attended private childcare centers or Head Start programs which could fall anywhere on the continuum from academic to play-based, but few if any, are likely to have been as structured and academic as the TN-VPK.

So why have these children, who mostly just hung out at home all day, been achieving better academically and doing better behaviorally over the years than the kids in the highly structured academic program?

The answer could be in how we are asking children to learn when we put academics in preschool.

Here are some things we know about children and learning. Children:

Don't have very long attention spans (Most 4-year-olds can attend for ~ 2 - 3 minutes on a task chosen for them by an adult. For self-directed play, it increases to ~ 8 - 12 minutes).

Learn best through open-ended, non-structured play.

Need to connect their brains and bodies through movement and hands-on activities for optimal brain development.

Learn problem-solving and flexibility through failing at something they want to do and then trying again.

Learn social skills through feedback by peers.

Are learning about who they are and how the world works through their interactions and the responses of others.

Are coming off a period of brain synapse explosion and moving into a period of brain synapse pruning, meaning that children's physical experiences in the world dictate which brain connections they get to keep - and which are cut.

Therefore, placing children into a full-day, adult-directed environment that expects them to sit still for long periods of time while attending, memorizing, reciting, and performing is in direct contrast to the many things we know about children and learning. This alone could explain why the children who mostly stayed home and played eventually did better academically and behaviorally than their peers who were in the academic preschool.

In addition, we propose that stress and anxiety play a large part here as well. We parents are not the only ones feeling the pressure!

How does it feel fora small child, who typically has a 2-minute attention span, to be required to sit still and listen to an adult talk for 15 minutes? Or, to be forced to do an adult-directed academic task for 10 minutes straight? Now remember that they must be still and perform for longer than they're truly capable of while under threat of punishment or causing teacher disappointment. Now, continue this hour after hour, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year.

I am getting tense just thinking about it.

The most self-regulated of children may succeed at this, but it will probably come at a cost. The less self-regulated children will fail - repeatedly. Failure, in this instance, is no longer a tool for developing flexibility, problem-solving, and learning. Instead, failure becomes a personality flaw, a statement of inadequacy, and a reason to doubt one's own self-worth.

Young children's brains and bodies are compelling them to move, touch, learn, explore, and to find new things to do! But, in structured preschools children are called-out, frowned at, and disciplined for wiggling, touching, not listening, not paying attention, and not doing things "the right way" for hours on end every day. They are surrounded by toys and other kids, but not allowed to touch them or interact with them in a way that makes sense to them for much of the day. This can be highly stressful to a young child.

Stress and anxiety can move the brain into danger-mode, triggering the flight, fight, or freeze response. At best, this leaves the brain unavailable for learning; at worst, two of these natural stress responses, fight and flight, will get you in some big trouble at preschool (and might even get you sent for testing...).

Preschool Today

The good news is that things have been slowly changing in our country preschool-wise since 2009 when these children (and my first born) went to Pre-K. Parents and educators are learning more and more about the value of play and its impact on academics and behavior. (For more information about play research, check out Peter Gray and Alison Gopnik).

Many preschools talk about the importance of children's play. Unfortunately, it is hard for parents to know exactly what "play" should look like in a preschool setting. For example, is working on a project considered playing? Plus, many parents and educators still want young children to learn school-y-things like reading and writing, to "prepare them for the rigor of kindergarten," which can become a slippery slope. (Don't even get me started on academics in kindergarten, that is another topic for another day.)

So, truly, the desire and push for academic rigor hasn't gone away (especially in certain locales) - it has simply gotten a better marketing team.

Every preschool (even highly structured, academic ones) now talk a good game about play and play-based philosophies. They say the right buzz-words, such as "problem-solving," "open-ended exploration," "fun," and "hands-on learning." However, the way to figure out where a preschool truly falls on the continuum of play-based to academic is to look at its daily schedule. Parents should ask specific questions about how the kids spend their time, or just spend a few hours observing how the classroom is run.

Here is the secret to knowing the difference: play is child-directed; academics are adult-led. It is that simple. Add up all the time that a child is sitting (or standing) and listening to a teacher, following adult-given directions, or following the direction of a worksheet or computer program. This is all academic time. Then add up all the time where the child is able to pick what they do, how they do it, how long they do it, and who they do it with. This is play-based time.

In Conclusion

Preschool should be a place for children to play freely in a safe and enriching environment so they can learn all of the things that will allow them to engage in academics later in their lives.

For the educators reading this, we can hit the brakes. We can push back against the push for more. We can incorporate more free-play time, more opportunities for active movement, less seated time, and fewer adult-directed activities in our classrooms. We can remind ourselves that when we do less, children do more, and ultimately learn more.

As parents, we can stop worrying about academics in early childhood education. We can stop trying to expose our children to everything at an early age. We can take six steps back and stop pushing so damn hard for our kids to do so much. We can stop the intense pressure around education (and parenting, in general) no matter where in the process your child is. We can turn away from that intoxicating siren song of parental pressure we put on each other, and ourselves. We can stop thinking in terms of what will look good on that future college application and start to think about what would make your child thrive contentedly right now.

If you are being told you are already two years late to apply for preschool, that you need to get into a specific preschool, or that your child must learn specific things in their preschool years, take comfort in knowing that you aren't, you don't, and they don't. It's all fine. There are many wonderful, stress-free childcare options available out there.

Does your family need childcare so the adults can go to work or get some alone time and sanity? Look for care that is low-stress, on the play-based side of the continuum, and allows kids to be kids.

You want to (or need to) keep your kid home with the family until kindergarten? Feel free to do just that without any guilt that you could be stunting your child's learning potential.

No matter what, trust that kids learn immense amounts just through playing, and it appears they might learn more, behave better, and be much happier in the process.

After over a decade of studying the children coming out of the academic TN-VPK, the researchers have developed this big-picture perspective: "Perhaps children do not need 'school' before K - 12 school. Perhaps they just need care."

Resources:

Almon, J. & Miller, E. (2011). The Crisis in Early Education. A Research-Based Case for More Play and Less Pressure. Published Online for Alliance for Childhood, November 2011. Publications and Reports - Alliance for Childhood

Durkin, K., Farran, D.C., Lipsey, M.W., & Wiesen, S. E. (2022). Effects of a statewide pre-kindergarten program on children's achievement and behavior through sixth grade. Developmental Psychology, 58(3), 470-484. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001301
Pre-print paper: Effects of a Statewide Prekindergarten Program on Children's Achievement and Behavior through Sixth Grade

Durkin, K., Farran, D.C., Lipsey, M.W. (2021) Scaling up Pre-k Statewide: Experimental Evaluation of the Policy. Vanderbilt University Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Research in Educational Effectiveness

About the Author

Karen earned her Master of Science degree in Occupational Therapy, specializing in pediatrics, from Thomas Jefferson University. She has spent over 20 years evaluating, developing, and implementing therapeutic programs to support the physical and mental health and development of children of all ages, from premature infants to high schoolers. Karen has worked with children, families, teachers, and other health-care professionals in a variety of settings including hospitals, clinics, in-home, private-practice, and public and private schools. She served as the co-chair of the Association of Pediatric Therapists (APT) for 10 years with a mission to foster communication, collaboration, and continuing education among therapists. Karen lives with her husband and two school-aged children in the San Francisco Bay Area. They spend their free-time together and with friends soaking in all the amazing things the area has to offer.

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An Argument Against Academics in Preschool

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The answer could be in how we are asking children to learn when we put academics in preschool.

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Alison Gopnik's work on why preschool should be less like school

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Alison Gopnik's work on why preschool should be less like school

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Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb. They pressure teachers to make kindergartens and nurseries more like schools. So does the law-the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act explicitly urged more direct instruction in federally funded preschools.

There are skeptics, of course, including some parents, many preschool teachers, and even a few policy-makers. Shouldn't very young children be allowed to explore, inquire, play, and discover, they ask? Perhaps direct instruction can help children learn specific facts and skills, but what about curiosity and creativity-abilities that are even more important for learning in the long run? Two forthcoming studies in the journal Cognition- one from a lab at MIT and one from my lab at UC-Berkeley -suggest that the doubters are on to something. While learning from a teacher may help children get to a specific answer more quickly, it also makes them less likely to discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution.

What do we already know about how teaching affects learning? Not as much as we would like, unfortunately, because it is a very difficult thing to study. You might try to compare different kinds of schools. But the children and the teachers at a Marin County preschool that encourages exploration will be very different from the children and teachers in a direct instruction program in South Side Chicago. And almost any new program with enthusiastic teachers will have good effects, at least to begin with, regardless of content. So comparisons are difficult. Besides, how do you measure learning, anyway? Almost by definition, directed teaching will make children do better on standardized tests, which the government uses to evaluate school performance. Curiosity and creativity are harder to measure.

Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments. We might start by saying: Suppose we gave a group of 4-year-olds exactly the same problems and only varied on whether we taught them directly or encouraged them to figure it out for themselves? Would they learn different things and develop different solutions? The two new studies in Cognition are the first to systematically show that they would.

In the first study, MIT professor Laura Schulz, her graduate student Elizabeth Bonawitz, and their colleagues looked at how 4-year-olds learned about a new toy with four tubes. Each tube could do something interesting: If you pulled on one tube it squeaked, if you looked inside another tube you found a hidden mirror, and so on. For one group of children, the experimenter said: "I just found this toy!" As she brought out the toy, she pulled the first tube, as if by accident, and it squeaked. She acted surprised ("Huh! Did you see that? Let me try to do that!") and pulled the tube again to make it squeak a second time. With the other children, the experimenter acted more like a teacher. She said, "I'm going to show you how my toy works. Watch this!" and deliberately made the tube squeak. Then she left both groups of children alone to play with the toy.

All of the children pulled the first tube to make it squeak. The question was whether they would also learn about the other things the toy could do. The children from the first group played with the toy longer and discovered more of its "hidden" features than those in the second group. In other words, direct instruction made the children less curious and less likely to discover new information.

Does direct teaching also make children less likely to draw new conclusions-or, put another way, does it make them less creative? To answer this question, Daphna Buchsbaum, Tom Griffiths, Patrick Shafto, and I gave another group of 4-year-old children a new toy.* This time, though, we demonstrated sequences of three actions on the toy, some of which caused the toy to play music, some of which did not. For example, Daphna might start by squishing the toy, then pressing a pad on its top, then pulling a ring on its side, at which point the toy would play music. Then she might try a different series of three actions, and it would play music again. Not every sequence she demonstrated worked, however: Only the ones that ended with the same two actions made the music play. After showing the children five successful sequences interspersed with four unsuccessful ones, she gave them the toy and told them to "make it go."

Daphna ran through the same nine sequences with all the children, but with one group, she acted as if she were clueless about the toy. ("Wow, look at this toy. I wonder how it works? Let's try this," she said.) With the other group, she acted like a teacher. ("Here's how my toy works.") When she acted clueless, many of the children figured out the most intelligent way of getting the toy to play music (performing just the two key actions, something Daphna had not demonstrated). But when Daphna acted like a teacher, the children imitated her exactly, rather than discovering the more intelligent and more novel two-action solution.

As so often happens in science, two studies from different labs, using different techniques, have simultaneously produced strikingly similar results. They provide scientific support for the intuitions many teachers have had all along: Direct instruction really can limit young children's learning. Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific-this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.

Why might children behave this way? Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental. It's this kind of learning, in fact, that allows kids to learn from teachers in the first place. Patrick Shafto, a machine-learning specialist at the University of Louisville and a co-author of both these studies; Noah Goodman at Stanford; and their colleagues have explored how we could design computers that learn about the world as effectively as young children do. It's this work that inspired these experiments.

These experts in machine learning argue that learning from teachers first requires you to learn about teachers. For example, if you know how teachers work, you tend to assume that they are trying to be informative. When the teacher in the tube-toy experiment doesn't go looking for hidden features inside the tubes, the learner unconsciously thinks: "She's a teacher. If there were something interesting in there, she would have showed it to me." These assumptions lead children to narrow in, and to consider just the specific information a teacher provides. Without a teacher present, children look for a much wider range of information and consider a greater range of options.

Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise. Indeed, these studies show that 4-year-olds understand how teaching works and can learn from teachers. But there is an intrinsic trade-off between that kind of learning and the more wide-ranging learning that is so natural for young children. Knowing this, it's more important than ever to give children's remarkable, spontaneous learning abilities free rein. That means a rich, stable, and safe world, with affectionate and supportive grown-ups, and lots of opportunities for exploration and play. Not school for babies.
Correction, March 17, 2011: This sentence originally omitted the names of two of the study's researchers. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

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New Research Shows That Teaching Preschoolers More and More, at Ever-Younger Ages, May Backfire

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Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb. They pressure teachers to make kindergartens and nurseries more like schools. So does the law-the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act explicitly urged more direct instruction in federally funded preschools.

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CT 2023 Law mandating play in Kindergarten

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How to practice effectively...for just about anything - Annie Bosler and Don Greene

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LEGO's take on rethinking purposeful play

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LEGO's take on rethinking purposeful play

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The need for lifelong learning has been evident for years based on the rapid pace of development, an increasingly dynamic society, and the impact of technology on our work and life. While foundational skills are a must, it is increasingly important to focus on the whole learner and help students develop holistic skills, including 21st century skills like communication, collaboration, problem-solving and creativity. These skills for holistic development also contribute to success and happiness in one's personal life.

Purposeful play is rooted in the pedagogical approaches such as project-based learning, which are known to increase student learning outcomes and, at the same time, enable a love of learning. It encourages students to systematically explore, experiment and continually iterate. Students benefit from opportunities to connect ideas, nurture creativity and apply their knowledge and skills. Playful learning experiences provide a way for students to naturally discover and engage in these learning experiences. And when students are engaged, learning becomes more motivating, memorable and meaningful. Students feel empowered to learn and explore without worrying about a wrong answer or finding the one right answer. To rethink the learning experience, we need to consider how to consistently create engaging, playful experiences in classrooms.

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The need for lifelong learning has been evident for years based on the rapid pace of development, an increasingly dynamic society, and the impact of technology on our work and life. ... - LEGO® Education Community

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Theme 2: Learners must cultivate 21st‑century skills, capabilities and attributes

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Will training for the skills likely to be most important in the jobs of the future work be effective in large-scale settings by 2026? Respondents in this canvassing overwhelmingly said yes, anticipating improvements in such education will continue.