In our technologically complex world, children frequently have problems to solve and skills to learn. They can develop solutions through learning strategies involving social learning or asocial endeavors. While evidence is emerging that children may differ individually in their propensity to adopt different learning strategies, little is known about what underlies these differences. In this article, we reflect on recent research with children, adults, and nonhuman animals regarding individual differences in learning strategies. We suggest that characteristics of children's personalities and children's positions in their social networks are pertinent to individual differences in their learning strategies. These are likely pivotal factors in the learning strategies children adopt, and thus can help us understand who copies and who innovates, an important question for cultural evolution. We also discuss how methodological issues constrain developmental researchers in this field and provide suggestions for ongoing work.

Whether schools help or hinder creativity is a topic of vibrant, international debate. Some contend that the focus on structure, rote learning and standardised assessments associated with formal education stifles children’s creativity. Others argue that creativity, much like numeracy or literacy, is a skill that can be taught, and educational settings provide optimal contexts for children to learn creative skills. With creativity increasingly recognised as a critical skill of the twenty-first century and formal education reaching more children across the globe, understanding the impact of schools on its development is critical. We suggest that much of the discourse on this topic has a narrow focus, precluding a global perspective. Here, we take a step back to integrate important but disparately presented research strands on education and creativity, to inform this debate. We first synthesize what we know about creativity and education, before presenting work on different areas—either directly or indirectly assessing creativity in educational contexts—including the relationship between creativity and academic achievement, classroom infrastructure and experiences, developmental slumps, teachers’ perspectives on creative children and research on culturally and educationally diverse populations. Reviewing research from these approaches shows that the relationship is nuanced and requires careful interpretation—while some research showcases the positive impact schooling can have on children’s creative development, other work, including from culturally and educationally diverse populations, shows how school experiences could be detrimental in this regard. We finish by summarising and integrating these research strands before making suggestions for future research.

A decade ago, now-seminal work showed that children are strikingly unskilled at simple tool innovation. Since then, a surge of research has replicated these findings across diverse cultures, which has stimulated evocative yet unanswered questions. Humans are celebrated among the animal kingdom for our proclivity to create and use tools and have the most complex and diverse technology on earth. Our capacity for tool use has altered our ecological environments irrevocably. How can we achieve so much, yet tool innovation be such a difficult and late-developing skill for children? In this article, I briefly summarize what we know about the development of tool innovation, then discuss five outstanding questions in the field. With a focus on different empirical and theoretical perspectives, I argue that addressing these questions is crucial for understanding fully the ontogeny of one of humans’ most notable skills.