The paper deals with partial domain specificity of creative behaviours and how their characteristics affect educational efforts and giftedness theory. When creative-productive giftedness is operationalized as observable activities to involve children in, clear guidelines for instruction can be set according to the domains of creativity. This research aims to present creativity as a continuum of clearly stated behaviours, partially domain specific, and weakly hierarchically organized.
In the period from 2006. to 2014. children and adolescents (aged 6 – 15; N = 671) listed behaviours they engaged in in extracurricular time. Their converging list was supplemented through extensive ongoing research. A list of 313 behaviours was compiled, covering broad range of activities (informatics, research, robotics, mathematics, drawing, painting, sculpting, drama, etc.). The focus of this research was on these productive behaviours. Psychology students (N = 32) categorized individually presented behaviours into as many groups they wanted according to their implicit theories of creativity content. Factor analysis resulted in distinct domains of creativity, each consisting of activities (behaviours), subsequently graded on number of characteristics. Behaviours were rated on how indicative for creativity (i.e. in what extent does the teaching staff (artists, scientists, teachers, school psychologists) consider each behaviour as a sign of creativity in children), how much knowledge is needed, how dependent on intelligence, how much effort is needed for each behaviour etc., altogether on eleven theoretically relevant characteristics (rater α's >.9).
Implicit structure of creative behaviours, number of types of activities, number of domains, and continuity of behaviours according to the complexity within domains, were assessed. In an attempt to evaluate creativity defined and graded as behaviours, teaching objectives were discovered, creating a usefull taxonomy of creativity as domain specific teaching ideas for educational work on development of creative-productive giftedness.