Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, creativity, learning, and technology became guiding lights for the debate on transforming conceptions and practices within education systems around the world. Given creativity’s intersubjective and agentic nature, it can work as an invaluable resource when promoting learning in formal and informal educational settings. Notwithstanding, these same features make it a challenge to know the conditions under which creativity development can be propelled through technology in educational contexts. Moreover, the technological revolution seems to have accelerated the pace of contemporary societies, often demanding rapid responses to creative challenges. Yet, from a developmental and constructivist standpoint, creativity is embedded in an intricate matrix where individual and sociocultural influences interact to help construct new ways of “worldmaking”. Thus, it can be envisioned as an attribute of the complexity of a psychological subject’s sociocognitive-emotional structures, whose development occurs in the interstitial space between self, others and the world, requiring time to manifest. Considering that technology modifies the person’s relation, action, construction of world(s), of others and self, we intend to discuss the mode and extent to which it can effectively be inscribed into education to promote the development of creativity. In this conceptual paper, we explore the impact on the continuous process of worldmaking (from where creativity blooms) of moving towards an ever-growing technological society, capable of innovative answers to the pandemic (e.g., distance learning) and other unpredictable challenges. We conclude by discussing how the so-called (re)constructive exploration pedagogies can be aligned with technology-based educational programs – capitalizing on their potential to transform human thinking, (inter)acting, and experiencing-, to nurture the development of creativity in education.

Creativity has become an essential curriculum competence, playing a pivotal role in the successful response to the ever‐changing demands of contemporary society. Yet, its complex, dynamic, and multifaceted nature seem conflicted with the predominant quantitative and easy‐to‐replicate curricular goals, resulting in potential incongruence between educational aims, pedagogical activities, and students' creativity development. Aiming to contribute to this debate, we designed a qualitative study, based on a documentary analysis of the Portuguese preschool and basic education‐intended curricula (legislation, legal norms, guidelines, programs, opinions, and recommendations). From an initial set of 194 documents, 20 complied with our selection criteria. Key findings underline the difficulties in outlining a clear and comprehensive definition of creativity as a distinctive dimension of psychological development, with consequences in how creativity‐focused pedagogical activities are applied within the classroom. Although recent educational reforms have attempted to overcome these limitations, they appear restricted to arts and sports subjects. Our results highlight the need to develop curricula anchored in an approach to creativity as a unique opportunity for psychological development. By intentionally promoting creativity in the curriculum, students' sense of agency, identity, self‐knowledge, and determination can be engaged, ultimately enhancing the underlying complexity of their socio‐cognitive emotional structures.

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Creative self-efficacy has emerged as one of the most striking constructs in education. Yet, instruments to assess it in children and adolescentsare scant. This article introduces the CASES, a new creative self-efficacy scale designed to address this concern. The process of development and initial validation of the scale are presented herein. Following the items’ conception, exploratory, and confirmatory factorial analysis was performed. The final structure comprises nine items, evenly distributed by three factors: fluency, elaboration, and personality. Preliminary reliability and validity analysis display good psychometric properties, highlighting CASES as a potentially relevant addition to the creative self-efficacy assessment instruments array. Designed for children and adolescents (ages 3 to 16), it can uphold a developmental approach of creative self-efficacy, with potential implications within educational settings. Thus, it might be of interest for parents, educators, educational psychologists, researchers, and policymakers involved in designing curricula and interventions to nurture and enhance creative potential.

The global COVID-19 pandemic disrupted face-to-face teaching, having a significant impact on the teaching-learning process. As a result, many students spent less time reading (and learning to read) than they did during face-to-face instruction, requiring the use of alternative approaches of instruction. A combined online and peer tutoring intervention was designed to improve reading skills such as fluency and accuracy. Following a quasi-experimental design, this study sought to evaluated the impact of implementing an online peer tutoring intervention on the development of reading fluency and accuracy in a sample of 91 2nd and 4th graders (49.6% female). Children were aged 6–10 years old (M = 7.81, SD = 1.10) and were enrolled in five classrooms (A, B, C, D, and E) from three schools in the Portuguese district of Porto, between January and May 2021. A set of 10 texts were chosen from official textbooks to assess reading fluency and accuracy. Classes were evaluated in three moments: initial (pre-intervention), intermediate (after 10 sessions) and final (post-test, after other 10 sessions). In order to examine the effects of the intervention, there was a 8-week lag between the start of the intervention in classes A, B, and C (experimental group) and classes D and E (control group). Moreover, classes D and E started intervention with a gap of 5 weeks between them. Students in the experimental group registered significant higher improvements in reading accuracy and fluency than in the control group. Interaction effects revealed that students with an initial lower performance (i.e., at the frustration level) showed higher increases in reading accuracy. Furthermore, 2nd graders showed higher increases throughout the intervention while the 4th graders stablished their progress after the first 10 sessions of intervention. Despite the study’s limitations, the findings support the positive impact that online peer tutoring can have on promoting students’ reading skills, adding to the ongoing discussion—which has gained a special emphasis with the COVID-19 pandemic—about the development of effective strategies to promote reading abilities in the first years of school.