Tests of creativity applications of creativity tests and issues in ability testing- Creativity definition, Creativity Concepts, three types of creativity, creativity theory, flow psychology, imagination. Development and Application of Tests of creativity-Traditional Areas of Psychometric Study, creative process,divergent thinking ad convergent thinking,Fluency, Originality, Flexibility, Elaboration. Major approaches to DT assessment. psychometric evidences, personality scales psychology, big five personality, Measurement of creativity, Research on creative talent . creative achievement, brainstorming issues in ability testing, several studies, and cultural diversity.

1. TESTS OF CREATIVITY
APPLICATIONS
ISSUES IN ABILITY
TESTING
Nidhin Chandrasekharan
M.Sc. Applied Psychology
Department of Psychology
Kerala University

2. ◦ Creativity is regarded as one of the most complex of
human behaviors.
◦ The existence of creativity as a modern term emerged
from the results of the pioneering efforts of Guilford
(1950) and Torrance (1962, 1974).
◦ According to Cook (1998) creativity is a divine quality,
serendipitous activity, planned luck, endurance and
method.

3. ◦ According to Runco & Sakamoto (1999) creativity
can be influenced by a wide array of social,
developmental and educational experience
leads to creativity in different ways in a variety of
fields .
◦ Guilford and Torrance were psychometric
theorists and they attempted to measure
creativity from a psychometric viewpoint.
(Sternberg, 2006).

4. CREATIVITY DEFINITION
◦ According to Andriopoulos (2000) creativity has been
perceived in different ways as a mental ability, a process and
a human behavior .
◦ Martins & Terblanche (2003) States that creativity as group of
meanings concentrates on individuals’ intellectual abilities
and personality traits and other definitions center attention
on the products themselves regarding creative outcomes and
qualities.
◦ Creativity is commonly regarded as the production of novel
and useful ideas or problem solutions (Sternberg & Lubart,
1999; Dewett, 2004; Amabile et al., 2005; Woerkum et al.,
2007)

5. CREATIVITY CONCEPT
Creativity includes two dimensions.
◦ Novelty notion: It is a phenomenon in everyday life and
therefore anyone can be creative as an essential aspect of
his/her contribute to the business environment and
everybody has to be involved in creative processes.
◦ Usefulness notion: which refers to material or practical
methods of assessing the usefulness of novel ideas (Shalley
et al., 2004).
Although there is no an agreement about where creativity
is situated in a process, a product, or a person, there is
agreement about creative work involving both the
concepts new and useful (Petrowski, 2000).

6. ◦ Creativity includes two principles ‘problem finding’, and
‘problem solving’, and creativity needs several skills and talents.
Thus, creative thinking is not conventional and requires
modifying or rejecting existing ideas (Herbig & Jacobs, 1996).
◦ The importance of creativity because of its ability to yield
and proper ideas to solve complex problems, to increase
efficiencies and to enhance overall effectiveness (Diliello &
Houghton, 2008).
◦ Similarly, Dewett (2004) identified that individual creativity has two
general facets which are creative efforts and creative outcomes.
◦ Individual creativity can be defined as “a person’s ability to think
beyond the obvious and produce something novel and
appropriate” Nayak, (2008).

7. Creativity can be divided into three types and they are:
1. creating something new,
2. combining things together,
3. and improving or changing things (Mikdashi, 1999).

8. It is regarded as a principal term in various fields ranging
from the
◦ fine arts and architecture,
◦ to psychology,
◦ sociology,
◦ economics,
◦ science,
◦ engineering and lastly management.
◦ The application of creativity in marketing can provide
added value to services or products, further than the
tangible aspects or clear characteristics of these
products or service (Sadi & Al-Dubaisi, 2008).

9. CREATIVITY THEORY
◦ Amabile (1997) suggested that the componential theory of creativity
indicates every individual has the capacity to engender at least slight
creative work and some factors such as working environment and
time may impact creative behavior level and its frequency.
◦ Based on this theory, individual creativity consists of three major
components, each being necessary for creativity in any situation. They
are:
Expertise or domain skills
Creativity thinking skills
Intrinsic task motivation.
Creativity occurs when individuals’ skills coincide with strong intrinsic
motivation and this will lead to higher creativity when based on the
higher level for each one of the three elements. Furthermore,
individuals show differences in the level of the components of individual
creativity (Amabile, 1996).

11. ◦ Although personality plays an important
role in intrinsic motivation, the social
environment can also impact on the level
of intrinsic motivation of individuals at any
time (Amabile, 1997).
◦ Hence, According to PerrySmith & Shalley
(2003) creative individuals are those
people who generate new methods to
carry out their work by coming up with
innovative ideas or novel procedures, and
by reconfiguring existing ways into new
alternative ways

12. ◦ Individuals may have
high creativity if they
have the personality
traits of creative people.
◦ For example, intrinsic
motivation of individuals
includes satisfaction of
curiosity, pleasure,
personal challenges, self-
expression and interest
(Amabile, 1993 & 1997).

13. ◦ Intrinsic motivation refers to the main
trait of creative people, and therefore
creative people tend to follow intrinsic
motivation, while extrinsic motivation
tends to hinder creativity (Runco, 2004).
◦ Expertise is knowledge:
intellectual, procedural, and technical. In
addition, expertise is considered as the
basis of creative work, and therefore
creative people do not create novel
ideas from nothingness, but those new
ideas start from domain-relevant
knowledge and a set of developed skills
(Simonton, 2000).

15. • Expertise in any activity is an essential element for producing new ideas,
opposed to existing ideas and that requires preceding knowledge of that
activity.
• Cognitive style means how individuals determine problems and provide
the solutions for those problems and their ability to merge existing ideas
to produce novel amalgamations (Kirton, 1989).
• Thus, cognitive style indicates the level of individuals’ imagination and
their flexibility in facing problems (Munoz-Doyague et al., 2008).

17. Development and Application of
Tests of creativity

18. Traditional Areas of Psychometric Study
◦ Psychometric methods in creativity research are typically grouped into four types of
investigations:
◦ creative processes
◦ personality and behavioral correlates of creativity
◦ characteristics of creative products
◦ and attributes of creativity-fostering environments.
◦ Unlike the more recent development of systems theories and multidisciplinary approaches,
which consider varied perspectives, the psychometric approach generally studied each of the
four aspects in isolation.

19. Creative Processes
◦ Researchers have used psychometric measures of creative process extensively for decades, and
they remain a popular measure of creative process and potential. Assessing creative processes is
also evident in our schools (Sawyer, 2015).

21. DT (Divergent Thinking)
◦ Kaufman, Plucker, and Baer (2008) have noted that it is one of the great ironies of the study of
creativity that so much time and energy have been devoted to the use of a single class of
assessments.
◦ In fact, not only has the most energy been expended on DT tests but almost all of the earliest
tests of DT remain in wide use in creativity research and education to this day.
◦ These include
◦ Guilford’s (1967) Structure of the Intellect (SOI) divergent production tests,
◦ Torrance’s (1974, 2008) Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT),
◦ and Wallach and Kogan’s (1965) and Getzels and Jackson’s (1962) DT tasks.

23. Fluency, Originality, Flexibility,
Elaboration
◦ For example, if a person were trying to decide what to
buy as a birthday present for her brother, she could
come up with as many ideas for presents as possible
(fluency),
◦ presents that no one else would think of (originality)
◦ a list of different types of presents he may like
(flexibility)
◦ or a list of the different basketball-related presents he
might like (elaboration)
◦ However, in this example, as in life, choices have to be
made eventually, and evaluative (convergent) thinking
must be done to select the actual gift to be purchased.

24. Major approaches to DT assessment.
◦ For example, the SOI DT battery consists of several tests that ask
participants to exhibit evidence of divergent production in
several areas, including divergent production of semantic units
◦ (e.g., listing consequences of people no longer needing to
sleep),
◦ of figural classes (finding as many classifications of sets of figures
as possible),
◦ and of figural units (taking a simple shape and elaborating on it
as often as possible).

25. ◦ Other examples include the Sketches task (fluency with figural
units)
◦ in which participants draw as many pictures as possible given
a specific shape, such as a circle
◦ the Alternate Letter Groups task (flexibility with figural
classes)
◦ which requires participants to, given a set of letters, form
subgroups of letters according to the figural aspects of the
letters the Associations task (originality with semantic
transformations)
◦ In which a person, given two words, finds a third word that
links the two (e.g., movie and fishing are linked by reel).

26. TTCT
◦ Over the course of several decades, Torrance (1974) refined the
administration and scoring of the TTCT, which may account for
its enduring popularity.
◦ The battery includes Verbal and Figural tests that each include
a Form A and Form B that can be used alternately.
◦ Verbal subtests include Asking, Guessing Causes, Product
Improvement, Unusual Uses,1 Unusual Questions, and Just
Suppose.
◦ The first three verbal subtests provide a picture to be used as a
stimulus. For example, the image might be an self gazing at the
reflection in a pool of water with participants asked as many
questions as they can about the image; guess causes for what
made the image come to be; and guess the consequences that
will result from the image. The other four verbal subtests are
independent and do not rely on an external stimulus. For
Product Improvement, participants are given a toy and asked for
different ways it could be improved.

27. ◦ There are three Figural subtests
consisting of Picture Construction,
Picture Completion, and
Lines/Circles. Picture Construction
requires participants to make a
picture out of a basic shape whereas
the Picture Completion subtest
provides a partially complete picture
and asks participants to finish and
name the drawing. The Lines/Circles
subtest provides participants with a
either a set of lines or circles to
modify and shape.

28. ◦ The most appreciable difference between the batteries lies in the
conditions in which students take the tests.
◦ Wallach and Kogan (1965) supported gamelike, untimed
administration of DT tasks that they believed allows creativity to be
measured distinctly from intelligence as a result of the creation of
“a frame of reference which is relatively free from the coercion
of time limits and relatively free from the stress of knowing
one’s behavior is under close evaluation” This constraint-free
administration is in contrast to the testlike, timed procedures used
with most other DT measures.
◦ Admittedly, much of this foundational work on creative assessment
is old. However, it is important to keep in mind because it serves as
the foundation of current practices.

29. Psychometric evidence
◦ Evidence of reliability for the SOI, TTCT, Wallach and Kogan, Getzels and Jackson, and similar tests is
fairly convincing (e.g., Torrance, 1981; Williams, 1980), but the predictive and discriminant validity of
DT tests has mixed support (cf. Bachelor, 1989; Clapham, 1996; Cooper, 1991; Thompson &
Anderson, 1983).
◦ However, the perceived lack of predictive validity (Baer, 1993, 1994; Gardner, 1993; Weisberg, 1993)
has led some researchers and educators to avoid the use of these tests and continues to serve as a
lightning rod for criticisms of the psychometric study of creativity.
◦ However, one important caveat is that it is not universally accepted that psychometric measures of
creative processes have poor predictive power.
◦ In fact, several studies provide at least limited evidence of discriminant and The Creative Person A
second major area of activity involves assessments of creative personality.
◦ Measures focusing on characteristics of the person typically focus on self-report or external ratings
of past behavior or personality characteristics.

30. Personality scales.
◦ Instruments intended to measure personality correlates of creative behavior are generally
designed by studying individuals already deemed creative and then determining their
common characteristics. These traits are then used as a reference for other children and
adults under the assumption that individuals who compare favorably are predisposed to
creative accomplishment.

31. ◦ Such measures are quite common in creativity research and include the Group Inventory for Finding Talent
and Group Inventory for Finding Interests (see Davis, 1989)
1. The Self Report of Creative Traits (Runco, Acar, & Cayirdaga, 2017),
2. NEO-Five Factor Inventory (McCrae & Costa, 1997)
3. Work undertaken at the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (Hall & MacKinnon, 1969;
MacKinnon, 1978),
4. Specific scoring dimensions of the Adjective Check List (Domino, 1994; Gough, 1979),
5. The Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (Cattell, Eber, & Tatsuoka, 1970),
6. The Creative Personality Scale (Kaufman & Baer, 2004) which consists of twenty items selected from the
International Personality Item Pool (Goldberg, 1999).

32. ◦ After analyzing research that relied on these and related instruments, Davis (1992) concluded
that personality characteristics of creative people include
◦ Awareness of their creativity, Originality, Independence,
Risk-taking, Personal energy, Curiosity, Humor, Attraction to
complexity and Novelty, Artistic sense, Open-mindedness,
Need for privacy, and Heightened perception.
◦ Similarly, Feist (1998) found consistently that creative people tend to be
“Autonomous, Introverted, Open to new experiences, Norm
doubting, Self-confident, Self-accepting, Driven, Ambitious,
Dominant, Hostile, and Impulsive” (p. 299), with openness,
conscientiousness, self-acceptance, hostility, and impulsivity having the largest effect sizes.
These studies mirror the results of other, recent studies and reviews of the literature (e.g.,
Batey & Furnham, 2006; Qian, Plucker, & Shen, 2010).

33. BIG
FIVE

34. ◦ Additionally, within the personality psychology research field, the Big Five (McCrae & Costa,
1997) has become more accepted as explaining human personality.
◦ Within creativity, a meta-analysis has found that Big Five personality traits have stronger
correlations to domain-general measures of creative self-beliefs than domain-specific
(Karwowski & Lebuda, 2015).
◦ Of the Big Five personality traits, openness to experience was the most strongly related to
creative self-beliefs; only neuroticism had a negative correlation (although this was weak).
◦ Although DeYoung (2015) points out that openness to experience itself has at least two
distinct yet related factors: intellect and openness.
◦ These can also be broken into intellectual engagement, explicit cognitive ability.

35. Measurement of creativity
Research on creative talent
◦ One of the major developments in psychological testing since midcentury concerns the
measurement of creativity.
◦ Thurstone (1951) emphasized distinctiom and provided a provocative, and certain perceptual
tendencies in creative behavior.
◦ Thurstone also observed creativity toward novel ideas and that creative solutions are more
likely to occur during periods of relaxed, dispersed attention than during periods of active
concentration on problem.
◦ Creativity, long regarded as the prime quality in artistic production, is coming more and more
to be recognized as a basis for scientific achievement as well.

37. Creative Achievement
◦ Although tests of divergent production, such as
those Guilford and Torrance, probably come close
to measuring the essential aspects of creativity,
other abilities are undoubtedly needed for
effective creative achievement, especially in the
sciences.
◦ Divergent production phase eventually followed
by critical evaluation.
◦ It is thus apparent that creative achievement
whether in science, engineering, art, music, or
other fields of human endeavor requires a
complex pattern of aptitudes and personality
traits appropriate to the particular field.

38. Brainstorming
◦ Creativity is stimulated by the temporal
separation of the productive and
evaluative phases of creativity activity. A
critical, evaluative attitude at an early
stage of creative production may be
seriously thwart the development of new
ideas, But critical evaluation is to be only
temporarily deferred, not permanently
abolished.

39. Psychological Issues in Ability Testing

41. Longitudinal studies of children’s
intelligence
◦ An important approach to the understanding of the
construct “intelligence” is through longitudinal studies of
the same individuals over long periods of time.
◦ Intelligence believed to be a largely an expression of
heredity potential each IQ was expected to remain very
nearly constant throughout life. Any observed variation on
retesting was attributed to weaknesses in the measuring
instrument, either inadequate reliability or poor selection
of functions tested.
◦ With increasing research it is realized that IQ itself is both
complex and dynamic.

42. Stability of intelligence test performance
◦ One explanation for the increasing stability of intelligence
test scores with age is provided but the cumulative nature
of intellectual development.
◦ Environmental stability has a key role in development of
most persons.
◦ Role of prerequisite learning skills on subsequent learning.
◦ Prerequisite learning covers not only intellectual skills as the
acquisition of language and of quantitative concepts, but
also attitudes, interests, motivation.
◦ Problem solving styles, reactions to frustration, self concepts
and other personality characteristics.

43. Instability of intelligence test
performance
◦ Drastic change in family structure or
home conditions, adoption into a
foster home, severe or prolonged
illness, and therapeutic or remedial
programs are examples of the type
of events that may alter the child’s
subsequent intellectual development.
◦ Individual’s emotional and
motivational characteristics.

44. Intelligence in early childhood
◦ The assessment of intelligence at the two extremes of the
age range presents special theoretical and interpretive
problems.
◦ The infant first discovers he/she can affect environment.
◦ Environmental mastery leads to goal
directed activities
◦ Toy games
There is a key role in parental contacts in the
early childhood for children’s intellectual development.

45. Problems in the testing adult intelligence
◦ Individual differences and age.
◦ Lack of knowledge
◦ Each time and place fosters the
development of skills appropriate to its
characteristic demands.
◦ Within the lifespan, these demands differ
for the infant, the schoolchild, the adult
indifferent occupations, and the retired
septuagenarian

46. Cultural
diversity

47. REFERENCES
1. American Educational Research Association., American Psychological
Association., National Council on Measurement in Education., & Joint
Committee on Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (U.S.).
(2014). Standards for educational and psychological testing. Washington,
DC: American Educational Research Association.
2. Anastasi A., & Urbina, S. (2017). Psychological Testing (7 ed.). Noida:
Pearson India Education Services Pvt. Ltd.
3. Singh,A.K. ( 2019).Tests, Measurements and Research methods in Behavioural
Sciences( 6 th edn). Bharati Bhawan Publishers & Distributors, New Delhi.

48. THANK YOU