Divergent thinking tests are often used in creativity research as measures of creative potential. However, measurement approaches across studies vary to a great extent. One facet of divergent thinking measurement that contributes strongly to differences across studies is the scoring of participants' responses. Most commonly, responses are scored for fluency, flexibility, and originality. However, even with respect to only one dimension (e.g., originality), scoring decisions vary extensively. In the current work, a systematic framework for practical scoring decisions was developed. Scoring dimensions, instructionscoring fit, adequacy of responses, objectivity (vs. subjectivity), level of scoring (response vs. ideational pool level), and the method of aggregation were identified as determining factors of divergent thinking test scoring. In addition, recommendations and guidelines for making these decisions and reporting the information in papers have been provided.

Divergent thinking tasks are the cornerstone of creative thinking assessment. Besides fluency, the number of generated ideas, several other scores have been used to measure different aspects of idea generation in divergent thinking tasks. However, between all such scores high correlations are quite common. These correlations, in particular high correlations of any score with fluency, were interpreted as evidence for unidimensionality of divergent thinking, or as evidence for equal odds. On the other hand, it has been argued that common scores do not properly adjust for fluency. Moreover, it has been assumed that high correlations are artifactual, that is, caused by same task method-bias. In this article, the confounding of additive scorings by fluency is quantitavely and theoretically analyzed. We show that the raw correlations between fluency and qualitiy alone cannot distinguish between different concurring theories about idea generation. We propose a formal definition of purely artifactual correlation that is oriented toward the generation process and allows to test for these conflicting theories. The performance of the test is carefully evaluated by a thorough simulation study and its application exemplified by a reevaluation of past results. We conclude with recommendations for the design and analysis of future studies.

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Scoring divergent‐thinking response sets has always been challenging because such responses are not only open‐ended in terms of number of ideas, but each idea may also be expressed by a varying number of concepts and, thus, by a varying number of words (elaboration). While many current studies have attempted to score the semantic distance in divergent‐thinking responses by applying latent semantic analysis (LSA), it is known from other areas of research that LSA‐based approaches are biased according to the number of words in a response. Thus, the current article aimed to identify and demonstrate this elaboration bias in LSA‐based divergent‐thinking scores by means of a simulation. In addition, we show that this elaboration bias can be reduced by removing the stop words (for example, and, or, for and so forth) prior to analysis. Furthermore, the residual bias after stop word removal can be reduced by simulation‐based corrections. Finally, we give an empirical illustration for alternate uses and consequences tasks. Results suggest that when both stop word removal and simulation‐based bias correction are applied, convergent validity should be expected to be highest.

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