Are the Verbal TTCT Forms Actually Interchangeable?

Abstract

One of the best‐known and most frequently used measures of creative idea generation is the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT). The TTCT Verbal, assessing verbal ideation, contains two forms created to be used interchangeably by researchers and practitioners. However, the parallel forms reliability of the two versions of the TTCT Verbal has not been examined for over 50 years. This study provides a long‐needed evaluation of the parallel forms reliability of the TTCT Verbal by correlating publisher generated and text‐mining‐based scores across the forms. The relatively weak relationship between the two forms, ranging between .21 and .40 for the overall TTCT Verbal and ranging between .03 and .33 for the individual TTCT Verbal tasks, suggests that caution should be exercised when researchers and practitioners use the two forms as equivalent measures of verbal creative idea generation.

The role of asking more complex questions in creative thinking.

“…One of the tasks historically used to assess question asking was the unusual questions task (UQT), based on Burkhart’s (1961) divergent questions task, the UQT was part of the original version of the classic creativity assessment battery, the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT; Torrance, 1966). The TTCT is one of the most widely used and studied measures of creative idea generation (Grajzel et al, 2022). The UQT was developed to assess divergent thinking, similar to the common and popular alternative uses task (AUT), which requires participants to generate alternative uses to objects (Acar & Runco, 2019).…”

Measuring flexibility: A text-mining approach

“…There were very high inter-correlations among the TTCT Pub-Flex, Pub-Flu, and Pub-Orig scores ranging between 0.83 and 0.99. The strong correlations among the DT dimensions are not unique to our current study and the lack of differentiation among dimensions on the TTCT has been long written about in the field ( Mansfield et al, 1978 ; Clapham, 1998 ; Mouchiroud and Lubart, 2001 ; Kim, 2006 ; Silvia et al, 2008 ; Zeng et al, 2011 ; Grajzel et al, 2022 ). Due to this strong correlation between Pub-Orig and Pub-Flex scoring, we were not able to establish discriminant validity of our OCS-Flex scoring method.…”