Measuring Creativity

Measuring Creativity

Divergent Production.
"To be successful we must live from our imaginations, not from our memories"
Steven Covey

These tests devised by Guilford (1967) are multi-faceted and include "uses for common objects" and "consequences." The former test asks the subject to list as many uses they can think of for a common object like a brick, thumb tack, paper clip (probably the most famous one), etc.

The "consequences" test asks the subject to list as many consequences they can think of if some basic change were made in our environment or in human beings. Examples:

Imagine a circle 1 inch (3cm) diameter. How many pictures of real objects can you make using it in one minute?
Make as many words as possible in one minute of the form L _______ N
Assume everyone reached their final height at the age of two. List as many consequences as possible.
Imagine four shapes - rectangle, circle, triangle and square. Combine them to make a face, a tree, a piece of playground equipment. Use each shape only once or not at all and contract or expand to any size.

Correlations between divergent production and creativity are questionable. The number of unusual ideas bears little relationship to creativity (Nickerson et al, 1985).

The Remote Associates Test
"Yesterday's Solution is today's problem"
John Moran

The RAT devised by Mednick and Mednick (1967). Creativity is interpreted as the ability to see relationships among ideas that are remote from each other. The subject is asked to provide a fourth word that relates or is associated in some way to three other words. For example, the fourth word that associates with the words, "rat," "blue," and "cottage" would be "cheese."

This test has been criticized because it measures convergent thinking ability, not divergent thinking ability (many would argue the high creatives have strong divergent thinking abilities).

Consensual Assessment Technique

Teresa Amabile looks at creativity as a property of products rather than people.
A product should be considered creative if observers who are familiar with the area agree that it is creative (Amabile, 1983, 1990). Her research indicates that observers who are familiar with an area tend to agree with one another in their creativity assessments. - 'If experts think it is creative then it is '

Adjective Check List (ACL-CPS)

This scale was developed by Gough in the late 70's using data from MacKinnon's architects, Air Force officers, research scientists, mathematicians, engineering students, and graduate psychology students at Berkley.

The final scale has 30 items and correlates fairly well with the creativity ratings given to these samples by expert judges and faculty.