Creativity has been considered in terms of process, product or person and has been defined

as the interpersonal and the interpersonal process by means of which original, high quality, and genuinely significant products are developed. In dealing with young children, the focus should be on the process, which is seen as the basis of creative potential. When trying to understand this process, it is helpful to consider Guilford's differentiation between convergent and divergent thought. Problems associated with divergent thought often have one correct solution. But problems associated with divergent thought require the problem-solver to generate many solutions, a few of which will be novel, of high quality, and workable -- hence creative.

For a proper understanding of children's creativity, one must distinguish creativity from intelligence and talent. Ward expressed concern about whether creativity in young children could be differentiated from other cognitive abilities. More recent studies have shown that components of creative potential can indeed be distinguished from intelligence. The term "gifted" is often used to imply high intelligence. But Wallach has argued that intelligence and creativity are independent of each other, and a highly creative child may or may not be highly intelligent.

Creativity goes beyond possession and use of artistic talent. In this context, talent refers to the possession of a high degree of technical skill in a specialized area. Thus an artist may have wonderful technical skills, but may not succeed in evoking the emotional response that makes the viewer feel that a painting, for example, is unique. It is important to keep in mind that children's creativity is evidenced not only in music, art, or writing, but also in science, social studies and other areas.

Most measures of children's creativity have focused on ideational fluency. Ideational fluency tasks require children to generate as many responses as they can to a particular stimulus, as is done in brainstorming. Ideational fluency is generally considered to be a critical feature of the creative process. Children's response may be either popular or original, with the latter considered evidence of creative potential. Thus when we ask four-year-olds to tell us "all the things they can think of red," we find that children not only list wagons, apples, and cardinals, but also children pox and cold hands.

For young children, the focus of creativity should remain on process: the generation of ideas. Adult acceptance of multiple ideas in a non-evaluative atmosphere will help children generate more ideas or move to the next stage, which is self-evaluation. As children develop the ability for self-evaluation, issues of quality and the generation of products become more important. The emphasis at this stage should be on self-evaluation rather than evaluation by others, for these children are exploiting their abilities to generate and evaluate hypothesis and to revise their ideas based on that evaluation. Evaluation by others and criteria for genuinely significant products should be used only with older adolescents or adults.

The passage suggests that creativity in children is mostly closely related ______.

A．talent

B．intelligence

C．a higher degree of technical skills

D．the process of developing original ideas