Measuring Creative Writing with the Storyboard Task: The Role of Effort and Story Length

Abstract

The present study examines effort in narrative creative writing (operationalized as time‐on‐task) using a new assessment approach, the storyboard task. Participants (N = 125) completed alternate forms of the storyboard task in two sessions five weeks apart. They also completed measures of divergent thinking and self‐reported ideational behavior. Time‐on‐task, story length, and rated creativity scores were obtained for the participants’ stories. The storyboard task demonstrated good alternate form reliability and convergent validity with the criterion measures. Although time‐on‐task was strongly, positively associated with creativity scores, this relationship was confounded by the contribution of story length. Relationships amongst these variables were similar when creativity was rated by novice raters using a rubric or experienced raters using the consensual assessment technique. Additionally, story length and time‐on‐task were moderately correlated with the external criterion measures of creativity. Thus, the strong associations between rated creativity, story length, and time in creative writing raise important issues and avenues for future research, and results for the storyboard task suggest that it is a valuable assessment of narrative creative writing.

It is not always better to have more ideas: Serial order and the trade-off between fluency and elaboration in divergent thinking tasks.

“…It is possible to reconcile our findings with the dual pathway theory of creativity, which proposes that high originality can result from persistence (Nijstad et al, 2010). However, this requires a loose interpretation of “persistence”—in the sense of investing a high “degree of sustained and focused task-directed cognitive effort” (Nijstad et al, 2010, p. 42), which could conceivably be extended to elaboration (see also Taylor et al, 2021). The usual interpretation of persistence in the sense that “ideas within a particular category become more original as time proceeds and more ideas have been generated within that category” (p. 47) cannot explain why originality was higher for ideas produced in very short sequences.…”

Dual pathways in creative writing processes.

“…The data were collected for use in a large-scale psychometric examination of the multiple individual resources involved in creativity (e.g., Taylor et al, 2020). The pilot study was conducted with the objective to select the optimal items and measures from a large number of measures.…”

“…Participants in the pilot study completed a set of measures in a single session auto-administered online. Participants in the main study completed assessments online and in the lab across five weekly sessions (see Taylor et al, 2020). In-lab assessments included the storyboard task, RPM, vocabulary, verbal analogies, verbal fluency, and semantic distance measures.…”

“…For example, De Dreu et al (2008) found that participants in mood states conducive to using the persistence pathway spent substantially more time on with more correct responses) than those in mood states conducive to using the flexibility pathway (for whom a shorter time-on-task was associated with more correct responses). On a self-paced creative writing task, this type of persistence on a task should also translate into a greater length of text (Taylor et al, 2020). Thus, if CHC abilities influence the creativity of a written product through processes related to persistence and effort (i.e., the persistence pathway), the relationship between CHC abilities and creativity DUAL PATHWAYS IN CREATIVE WRITING PROCESSES should be explained by the length of the production and time-ontask.…”

“…In the context of (self-paced) creative writing, persistence and effort may be evidenced by the length of a written production (Taylor et al, 2020) and time-on-task (De Dreu et al, 2008). Indeed, effortful cognitive processes require a comparatively greater amount of time to generate and to find creative solutions (Acar & Runco, 2014; De Dreu et al, 2008).…”