Collaborative creativity processes: Micro-level theory, methods, results, and implications for education

To prepare students to address the world’s complex problems (war, climate change, etc.), teachers can have them collaborate on creative solutions. Notably, students can solve more problems with others than they can alone, especially when they disagree effectively (sociocognitive conflict theory) and learn from these collaborations (social constructivism theory). However, collaborators concerned with their relative status (social comparison theory and status theory) can distort their evaluations toward higher status people’s ideas, as indicated by politeness discourse markers (politeness theory). Using new mixed methods (statistical interpretive discourse analysis), studies have modeled micro-level collaborative creativity processes. Their results have yielded specific teacher recommendations (e.g., role-model the processes, work in pairs before working in groups, monitor, and intervene when necessary) to increase their students’ creativity to solve global problems. Copyright © 2025 Oxford University Press.