Metacognitive Experience Across the Creative Process

In the first part of the chapter, recent literature is critically discussed to examine the relationships between creativity and metacognition–intended as metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive awareness, and metacognitive control. In the second part, we report an experimental study on primary school children. Participants were engaged in a creative thinking training programme with two conditions where they were either asked or not asked to rate the level of ability, effort, and liking perceived both before (prediction) and after (retrospection) carrying out the creative tasks. Creativity scores increased as a consequence of the training. The prediction/retrospection task enhanced only one aspect of creative thinking, namely, the ability to widen the mental field. Calibration –the match between the subjective prediction of the performance and the actual performance– improved across the training, as well as the quality of the retrospective judgments about the performance. Possible future directions of research about the role of metacognition in creativity and implications for education are highlighted.