Neurodivergent art teacher Alice Guile uncovers a powerful synergy between divergent and convergent thinking.
Many neurodivergent children struggle in school and compare themselves unfavourably with their neurotypical peers. I have been diagnosed, as an adult, with ADHD, and struggled with my attention span in school, which resulted in daydreaming. I am an art teacher, and having experienced the struggles of going through school with an undiagnosed learning difficulty, I want to do all I can to help students who may be in a similar position. Teachers can design lessons which highlight students’ strengths, and we can show them things they may be able to do better than neurotypical children. Neurodivergent children can often be imaginative, and research shows they can often score better on tasks involving imaginative thinking than other students. Knowing this, I decided to design a lesson based around creative thinking. My research led me to discover the paperclip imagination text and the psychologists who invented it.
In 1968, psychologists George Land and Beth Jarman began a fascinating study into creative thinking. They used a test they had previously designed to test the creative thinking abilities of NASA scientists. The test consisted of asking participants to imagine alternative uses for a paperclip, and scientists who scored over a certain amount were labelled as creative geniuses. The psychologists felt that this test was so simple that children would be able to do it. They gave the test to 1,600 three to five year-olds who were enrolled in a sure start program, then retested them at age ten and again at fifteen. They continued giving the study to 280,000 adults with an average age of 31, and found that 98% of five year-olds scored a level that would have labelled them a creative genius in NASA screening. 30% of ten year-olds did, 12 % of 15 year-olds did, and among adults, a shocking 2% could be considered creative geniuses.
The psychologists concluded that there are two types of thinking, convergent and divergent. Divergent thinking is about imagination and thinking of lots of different possibilities. Convergent thinking is about discernment and choice making, finding the right answer. Divergent thinking happening, then convergent thinking can have a powerful effect, many possibilities are explored, and then they are filtered. The problem is that the emphasis we have in schools on getting the right answer means that convergent and divergent thinking try to happen at the same time, which leads to all possibilities other than the most obvious solution being dismissed. This leads to children becoming less good at the paperclip test the older they get, as their creative thinking abilities diminish. The brains of neurodivergent people work differently to those of neurotypical people, and it is possible that being neurodivergent may offer protection against creative atrophy.
Inspired by this study, I ran my own paperclip text lessons for some classes from year 7 to year 10. I allowed children to work alone or in groups. The results of this were in keeping with the results of the original study, and the younger children tended to do better. My best group found nearly 150 alternative uses for a paperclip. Interestingly, this group included a child with Autism and ADHD, who was randomly shouting out the craziest things he could think of, in a hyperactive manner, with no regard for whether his ideas were realistic. He was behaving in a way typical of someone with ADHD. The other students in the group included a pair of identical twins who had recently moved from Germany, and who wrote everything down in a focused, diligent way, and came up with a system to increase ‘productivity’. The student with ADHD would shout something out like ‘You could post the paperclip to China!’ The twins would write quotation marks under the line ‘You could post’ to show repetition, and then wrote the names of every country they could think of.
This was done several times with different ideas such as ‘you could give the paperclip to [insert celebrity’s name here]’ or ‘You could mine for [insert gemstone here]’. Using this system they generated lots of ideas in a short space of time. Studies have shown that the chaotic mind and distractibility of ADHD can lead to more creative ideas. That student did not have the attention span to write anything down, but fortunately he was working with two organised, efficient students who did. It may be that the twins were simply good at this due to their personalities, or it could be linked to the manner of their upbringing and education in Germany. The paperclip study did show, after all, how much education can affect the way we think. Their success shows the power of divergent, creative thinking happening first, followed by convergent, organised thinking happening second. Without the child with ADHD, the twins might have had far fewer ideas. Without the twins, the student with ADHD would have written nothing down. Together, they were way more successful than any other group.
I talked to the students about the concept of neurodiversity and how it can help people to be more creative. The autistic student and another student chose to tell the class that they had Autism and ADHD, which they clearly viewed as something to be proud of, and to share with people. I was happy with this, as some neurodivergent students may come to view their neurodiversity as a bad thing. We also discussed the importance of being able to have creative ideas in the workplace, such as when thinking up new product ideas for a company. The student with ADHD thanked me for helping him feel more positive about his neurodiversity. He had previously told me he hated being different.
I was happy with my paperclip creativity test lessons, and I look forward to doing them again. Not only because they encourage students to think more creatively, but also because they may allow neurodiverse students to perform better than average, when they may struggle more than their peers with other aspects of school. I would strongly recommend it to other teachers, and to parents. You could do it yourself, alongside the children, to see who scores higher, and you could try the task with other ordinary objects, such as a brick or a toothbrush.