Enhance creativity and creative self-efficacy. An action research with Italian children

Creativity is a human resource that allows individuals to solve problems in a new way and propose changes. It is related to creative self-efficacy that regards individual belief to be creative. The present study explored the effects of a training to enhance creativity and creative self-efficacy in 34 Italian children, aged between 8 and 10 years and divided in two groups: Group1 (training) and Group2 (no training). Test of Divergent Thinking and the Creative Self-efficacy Scale were modified for Italian children. After training, Group1 increased inflexibility, elaboration and title production; and Group2increased in titles production; all children showed higher levels of self-efficacy than before training. After training, positive relationships between creative self-efficacy, elaboration and titles production emerged for Group1. Keywords: Creativity, self-efficacy, training, children.

Classics Illustrated and the Evolving Art of Comic-Book Literary Adaptation

During its thirty-year history, from 1941 to 1971, the first US series of Classics Illustrated comic-book adaptations of literary fiction and biography continually reaffirmed its intent to guide young readers to engagement with “the original text.” Adaptation approaches varied in the 169 titles over the course of decades of new-title production. Most of the earlier issues remained in print, resulting in a mixture of simultaneously available adaptation styles. The three eras in CI adaptation might be loosely described as Interpretive (1941–44), Hybrid (1945–56), and Faithful (1957–62). Although scriptwriters’ methods overlapped, precluding neat boundaries, the issue of textual fidelity was a constant concern, explicitly or implicitly. Analyses of individual adaptations by representative scriptwriters illuminate the evolution of adaptation goals and strategies in a new, disfavored medium and reveal the adapters’ offhand creation of their own canon that in some ways has outlasted the canon they sought to enshrine.