RESEARCH EVIDENCE

Case Study is an exercise used to analyze or study a specific phenomenon, situation, or problem. As a teaching method, case study offers a way for students to practice both critical thinking and creativity skills to build and strengthen problem-solving skills, which has been documented in the literature as an important way to increase students’ creative skills (Brodin & Frick, 2011). 

Community Organizations (or Partners) might include:

• Before and after school programs
• Nonprofit organizations
• Health care providers
• Postsecondary institutions
• Government agencies
• Foundations
• Local businesses

Creative may refer to a person, a process, an idea, environment, or product. The four-P’s model (Rhodes, 1961) is used in research to distinguish between the four P’s: the creative person, process, product, and press (i.e., environment).

Creativity is the interplay between ability and process by which an individual or group produces an outcome or product that is novel and useful as defined within some social context (Plucker, Beghetto, and Dow, 2004). 

Creative Ideas represent something different, new, or innovative; of high quality; and be appropriate to the task at hand (Kaufman and Sternberg, 2007).  

Creativity Research includes studies conducted from various angles and disciplines, including psychology, sociology, business, education, economics, literature, and neuroscience.

Critical Thinking is strongly connected to creativity. Critical thinking may include observation, questioning, logical reasoning, questioning assumptions, and exploring competing or alternative explanations.

Flow is experienced during the creative process and describes the feelings and sensations that occur when an individual is intensely engaged in a creative activity (Csikzentmihalyi, 1996).

"My first studies involved a few hundred "experts" -- artists, athletes, musicians, chess masters, and surgeons -- in other words, people who seemed to spend their time in precisely those activities they preferred. From their accounts of what it felt like to do what they were doing, I developed a theory of optimal experience based on the concept of flow -- the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it" (Csikzentmihalyi, 1990, p. 4).

Well-Being includes individual's physical, mental, and social health, and the opportunities to create meaningful futures. Significant factors that shape well-being are food, housing, education, employment, income, social and emotional needs (e.g., sense of purpose, safely, sense of belonging) (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2022).