Studies of creativity focusing on education originated in the United States, with the first experimental works dating from the 1950s. Pioneers in the field include Guilford (1950), Osborn (1953), Taylor (1956), Torrance (1962), and Getzels and Jackson (1962). We should also mention the publication in 1883 of Galton's Inquiries into Human Faculty, which had already offered ideas on measuring creativity (Taylor & Barron, 1963) and which gave rise to a great deal of research into creativity and imagination during subsequent decades.

During the 1930s, American psychologists and psychometrics experts prepared a series of tests aimed at measuring originality and its relationship with intelligence. Results, however, showed very little correlation. Subsequent research focused on the creative personality. It was not until 1950, however, that scientific research on creativity gained prominence with Guilford's work on the subject and his 1950 presidential address to the American Psychological Association. Guilford defined creativity as the mental abilities implicit in the creative effort. In his famous model on the structure of intelligence, he defined divergent thought as the capacity to generate information from a given idea or other piece of information, in which the emphasis lies in the variety of responses resulting from the original idea, the product of innovation, originality, an unusual synthesis, or perspective. Divergent thinking includes the factors of fluidity, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. Around 1951, Osborn established the Creative Education Foundation, and two years later he published work on applied imagination and a review of creativity.