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There are two foundational assumptions that underlie research in interactivity. First, that resources external to the human agent should support problem-solving and other cognitive activities and second, that human agents naturally engage in this form of offloading when they are allowed to. We aimed to test whether participants would naturally engage with external resources, without prompting, in four types of simple verbal problems and whether the level of engagement was affected by expertise or the experience of impasse. We found that very few people naturally engaged external resources apart from with mathematical problems where it had a benefit. There was no difference in expertise in problem-solving between those who did and those who did not use external props and nor was there a significant difference in the proportion of people using external resources as a function of experiencing impasse. These results suggest that researchers in interactivity need to focus on how and when interactivity is both engaged and provides a benefit.

Analogical transfer between source and target problems ought to be a major contributor to problem-solving and learning. Yet, data from laboratory studies show that successful spontaneous analogical transfer does not reliably occur in the absence of explicit hints to analogize, in the presence of a delay between source and target, or when there are extensive filler tasks, a finding attributed to the complexity of analogy retrieval and mapping. Here, we show that participants solving variants of the Cards problem often failed to show transfer between source and target problems that shared both conceptual and superficial similarities. Frequency of re-inspecting the task instructions was a significant predictor of transfer, with participants successful at T2 requiring fewer re-inspections. The results suggest that analogical transfer may be limited, not just by the difficulty of mapping between source and target, but by a lack of conceptual understanding of the source and its solution, even when the source is solved.

Research in creativity often measures creative potential: the number of ideas which can be generated, or the way a novel thought appears in the mind of the thinker. There is much less emphasis on creative thought during the realization of this potential. This paper uses focused cognitive ethnography to explore how creativity is manifest in a complex environment. We report four main findings: that creativity involves a form of "knowing through doing," that creativity requires risk on different levels, that an embodied material sensitivity is required to make ideas appear in the world and that the form of the creative product is often unstable. We end with some reflections on the importance of detailed microgenetic work to expand our understanding of the embodied and responsive skills which are necessary for creativity.

Qualitative research on creativity often highlights the role of accidents in creative process, but there is little research that takes these as its main topic. Perhaps because a model that relies on accidents undermines the meaningfulness of creativity; perhaps because the phenomenon itself is too complex to underwrite an entire research program. This paper suggests the framework of serendipity to better understand the interaction between a person and chance occurrences. Serendipity is a fortuitous accident, the enactment of environmental luck by a prepared mind. Current research on serendipity proceeds from a mainly retrospective position, centring the experience of the person. This creates a serendipitous narrative without necessarily telling us more about the moment itself. It is thus harder to consider the role of accidental moments and the nature of their contribution to the creative process. We argue that these moments, viewed outside of the person's narrative account, are worthy of study and offer some suggestions for how that might occur. We use the term "microserendipity" to designate moments which arise from distributed creative agency. We suggest we can support current research in both creativity and serendipity by undertaking detailed analysis of observational data to scaffold understanding of these complex phenomena.

Equipping future professionals and educators with critical global multicultural competences and skills to work with people from diverse backgrounds is a challenge for both predominantly White institutions (PWIs) and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The major objective of this article is to introduce an adaptable model with an array of strategies from the authors' experiences teaching diversity that can be applied to teaching social justice. These strategic models and conceptual frameworks emerge from the authors' disciplines and their personal experiences as African American faculty teaching in PWIs and a HBCU. This approach is one that can be helpful to instructors, regardless of discipline, as they teach courses related to diversity, multiculturalism, and social justice. Further, the article will provide a framework for instructors to evaluate their personal approach to teaching diversity and social justice. It is particularly useful in understanding some of the resistance and negativity that are inherent in courses that challenge students' values and belief systems. Women and people of color who teach these courses may find that the authors' stories affirm and validate their own experiences in both PWIs and HBCUs. Accordingly, this article provides a provides a snapshot of a social justice, philosophical, pedagogical, and practical conceptual framework for teaching social justice to culturally diverse college students which those students in turn can use to teach their students and clients to analyze systems of inequality and discrimination.