Children’s developing reflections on and understanding of creativity

•Children’s definitions of creativity relate to the way they reflect on creativity.•By age 8, children recognize novelty to be important in their judgements of creativity.•Young children and adults value the utility of a creative action more than older children.•Regardless of their age, children recognize creative acts in their everyday lives. Children’s creativity is often investigated through adults’ subjective judging of novelty in a product, or by assessing the flexibility of children’s thinking. These approaches do not explicitly ask children to reflect on what they think is creative and often ignore children’s metacognitive understanding of creativity. We took two approaches to examining this development. First, using semi-structured interviews, we asked children, ages of 5–10 (N = 75), to define creativity and reflect theirs and others’ creative actions (Study 1). As children got older, they reflected more on the novelty of the action and were more likely to describe creativity as a process that could be applied generally. Second, using more laboratory-based methods, we asked 5- to 10-year-olds (N = 137) and adults (N = 150) about the role that novelty (Study 2) and utility (Study 3) play in creative actions. In Study 2, children were more likely to judge that a novel action was more creative as they got older, and there was no difference between children and adults’ responses by age 8. In Study 3, when two novel actions were contrasted, and one was more useful (but less novel), adults chose the useful action as more creative, whereas older children chose the more novel action. Overall, children’s understanding of creativity as a general process undergoes significant change around mid-childhood, which has implications for its importance for informal learning environments.