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Many training programs have aimed to improve creative thinking abilities in various settings. The study of relevant literature revealed a relatively lower number of creativity programs for children than those developed for adults. The current work introduces a new and comprehensive nineweek long creativity intervention program implemented (out of school-setting) in 8- to 11-year-old children of socioeconomically disadvantaged families in Turkey. The intervention program was organized around four main themes (Persona, Object, Surrounding, Experience) and composed of nine activities: collection making, identity box, building a memory-device, designing an object, sensory mapping, designing a space, visual storytelling, exploring an imaginary planet, and solving a social conflict. Children (n = 159) were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups, and they took the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking both before and after the intervention. Results showed that children in the experimental group had significantly higher verbal fluency and originality scores at the posttest compared to the control group. These results provide further evidence for the trainability of creativity and introduce a novel, affordable creativity intervention program that is feasible enough to be implemented in and out of the school setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numbers are conceptualized spatially along a horizontal mental line. This view is supported by mounting evidence from healthy adults and patients with unilateral spatial neglect. Little is known about children's representation of numbers with respect to space. This study investigated elementary school children's directional biases in physical and numerical space to better understand the relation between space and number. We also examined the nature of spatial organization in numerical space. In two separate tasks, children (n= 57) were asked to bisect a physical line and verbally estimate the midpoint of number pairs. In general, results indicated leftward biases in both tasks, but the degree of deviation did not correlate between the tasks. In the number bisection task, leftward bias (underestimating the midpoint) increased as a function of numerical magnitude and interval between number pairs. In contrast, a rightward deviation was found for smaller number pairs. These findings suggest that different underlying spatial attentional mechanisms might be directed in physical and numerical space in young school children, which would be integrated in adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]