This book offers interdisciplinary, multicultural, and international perspectives on the interrelation between culture, innovation, change and creative forces. Its wide-ranging contributions present theoretical and empirical approaches and with reference to different domains across disciplines including psychology, education, social sciences, humanities, and engineering. The authors demonstrate how urgent social, environmental, technological, and economic challenges can benefit from individual, and community creativity to effect change. In this volume, “culture” refers to sociocultural differences, educational culture, media culture, organizational culture, technological culture, ethnic differences within a culture, and digital culture. Its contributors offer fresh insights on how creativity, innovation, and change can propel us forward and offer hope for the future across these many different forms of culture. They offer both granular studies of creativity and innovation at work in particular contexts and macro-level discussion on how they affect organizational culture, the culture of a discipline and society at large. This cross-cultural analysis of creativity, innovation and approaches to change will particularly appeal to practitioners and researchers in the fields of psychology, organizational behavior and education.

This book reflects on the various ways in which intelligence can manifest itself in the wide range of diverse contexts in which people live. Intelligence is often viewed as being tantamount to a score or set of scores on a decontextualized standardized intelligence test. But intelligence always acts within a sociocultural context. Indeed, early theorists defined intelligence in terms of adaptation to the environment in which one lives. The tradition of decontextualization is old, dating back to the very beginning of the 20th century with the development of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scales. This tradition is not only old, however, but obsolete. Because people live in different sociocultural as well as physical environments, intelligence can take somewhat different forms in different places and even at different times. The chapters in this edited volume show that intelligence viewed in the abstract is a somewhat vacuous concept - it needs to be contextualized in terms of people's physical and sociocultural surroundings.

In this volume, Robert J. Sternberg and David D. Preiss bring together different perspectives on understanding the impact of various technologies on human abilities, competencies, and expertise. The inclusive range of historical, comparative, sociocultural, cognitive, educational, industrial/organizational, and human factors approaches will stimulate international multi-disciplinary discussion. Major questions that are addressed include: *What is the impact of different technologies on human abilities? *How does technology enhance or limit human intellectual functioning? *What is the cognitive impact of complex technologies? *What is the cognitive impact of the transfer of technologies? *How can we design technologies that foster intellectual growth? *How does technology mediate the impact of cultural variables on human intellectual functioning? Part I addresses the history of cognitive technologies and how they have evolved with culture, but at the same time helped culture evolve. Part II focuses on how educational technologies affect the ways in which students and others think. The topic of Part III is technology in the world of work. Part IV deals with the interface between intelligence and technology. The diversity and richness of technology relates to different forms of abilities, competencies, and expertise. In consequence, many psychologists, educators, and others are interested in exploring the ways in which technology and human abilities interact, but lack a handy source of information to satisfy their interest. This book provides researchers and students in these areas with relevant perspectives and information.

This book captures the diversity and richness of writing as it relates to different forms of abilities, skills, competencies, and expertise. Psychologists, educators, researchers, and practitioners in neighboring areas are interested in exploring how writing develops and in what manner this development can be fostered, but they lack a handy, unified, and comprehensive source of information to satisfy their interest. The goal of this book is to fill this void by reflecting on the phenomenon of writing from a developmental perspective. It contains an integrated set of chapters devoted to issues of writing: how writing develops, how it is and should be taught and how writing paths of development differ across writing genres. Specifically, the book addresses typologies of writing; pathways of the development of writing skills; stages of the development of writing; individual differences in the acquisition of writing skills; writing ability and disability; teaching writing; and the development and demonstration of expertise in writing.

" This book] is solid in its topic coverage and delivery Readers will glean a multitude of new ideas from the theories and approaches presented in this book, ranging from cultural aspects of teaching to Sternberg's WICS model."

--"Doody's"

This book serves as a comprehensive review of the current state-of-the-art in educational psychology and applied cognitive science. The chapter authors, who are all leading researchers in this field, provide reviews of contemporary discoveries related to educational research that are both novel and forward-thinking. The book contains the cutting edge literature on genetics and neuroscience, cognitive science and its relation to critical thinking, reading-related phonological processes, cultural considerations in education, and much more.

The research methods and perspectives discussed range from education and psychology, to artificial intelligence and economics, thus offering a breadth of knowledge and insight on the field of educational research. The authors provide numerous tools and models for both routine and non-routine decision-making in educational settings. Both psychologists and researchers in the fields of cognitive, developmental, educational, and cultural psychology will want this book on their bookshelf.

In this volume, Robert J. Sternberg and David D. Preiss bring together different perspectives on understanding the impact of various technologies on human abilities, competencies, and expertise. The inclusive range of historical, comparative, sociocultural, cognitive, educational, industrial/organizational, and human factors approaches will stimulate international multi-disciplinary discussion. Major questions that are addressed include: *What is the impact of different technologies on human abilities? *How does technology enhance or limit human intellectual functioning? *What is the cognitive impact of complex technologies? *What is the cognitive impact of the transfer of technologies? *How can we design technologies that foster intellectual growth? *How does technology mediate the impact of cultural variables on human intellectual functioning? Part I addresses the history of cognitive technologies and how they have evolved with culture, but at the same time helped culture evolve. Part II focuses on how educational technologies affect the ways in which students and others think. The topic of Part III is technology in the world of work. Part IV deals with the interface between intelligence and technology. The diversity and richness of technology relates to different forms of abilities, competencies, and expertise. In consequence, many psychologists, educators, and others are interested in exploring the ways in which technology and human abilities interact, but lack a handy source of information to satisfy their interest. This book provides researchers and students in these areas with relevant perspectives and information.

Creativity and the Wandering Mind: Spontaneous and Controlled Cognition summarizes research on the impact of mind wandering and cognitive control on creativity, including imagination, fantasy and play. Most coverage in this area has either focused on the negative consequences of mind wandering on focused problem solving or the positive effect of mindfulness, but not on the positive consequences of mind wandering. This volume bridges that gap. Research indicates that most people experience mind wandering during a large percentage of their waking time, and that it is a baseline default mode of brain function during the awake but resting state. This volume explores the different kinds of mind wandering and its positive impact on imagination, play, problem-solving, and creative production.