Creativity Tests

Encyclopedia of Childhood and Adolescence by Rosalie Wieder

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Some creativity tests specifically address the problem of assessing creativity in minority populations, who are at a disadvantage in tests that place a strong emphasis on verbal and semantic ability. The SOI-Learning Abilities Test (ages 2-adult) includes such categories as constancy of objects in space; auditory attention; psychomotor readiness; auditory concentration for sequencing; and symbolic problem-solving.

The use of creativity tests such as this can aid in identifying gifted minority students, who, as a group, do not perform as well on standard IQ tests as non-minority students and are thus overlooked in the allocation of resources for talented students. (In one minority-populated school in Florida, only four out of 650 students were labeled as gifted according to aptitude standard tests.) The Eby Gifted Behavior Index (all ages) reflects the growing view of creativity as specific to different domains. It is divided into six talent fields: verbal, social/leadership, visual/spatial, math/science problem-solving, mechanical/technical, and musical. The Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, for adolescents and adults, is a more analytical assessment of giftedness based on five components of critical thinking: inference, deduction, interpretation, awareness of assumptions, and evaluation of arguments.

Creativity tests have been found reliable in the sense that one person's scores tend to remain similar across a variety of tests. However, their validity has been questioned in terms of their ability to predict the true creative potential of those who take them. In one study, there was little correlation between the scores of both elementary and secondary students on divergent thinking tests and their actual achievements in high school in such creative fields as art, drama, and science. Creativity tests have also been criticized for unclear instructions, lack of suitability for different populations, and excessive narrowness in terms of what they measure. In addition, it may be impossible for any test to measure certain personal traits that are necessary for success in creative endeavors, such as initiative, self-confidence, tolerance of ambiguity, motivation, and perseverance. Tests also tend to create an anxiety-producing situation that may distort the scores of some test takers. Teresa Amabile, a well-known researcher in the field of creativity, has advocated assessing creativity by observing a child's creative activities in a natural setting, such as painting or storytelling.

Critiques of tests that involve divergent thinking have also been based on the conclusion of many researchers that creative accomplishment actually requires both divergent and convergent thinking. Besides being original, the successful solution to a problem must also be appropriate to its purposes, and convergent thinking allows one to evaluate one's ideas and reject them if they cannot withstand further scrutiny.

Further Reading

For Your Information

Books

• Amabile, Teresa. The Social Psychology of Creativity. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1983.
• ------. Growing Up Creative: Nurturing a Lifetime of Creativity. New York: Crown Publishers, 1989.
• Guilford, J. P. The Nature of Human Intelligence. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.
• Sternberg, R. J. The Nature of Creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Torrance, E. P. Guiding Creative Talent. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962.

Gale Encyclopedia of Childhood & Adolescence. Gale Research, 1998.