Psychometric Issues in the Assessment of Creativity

Are intelligence and creativity really so different?☆Fluid intelligence, executive processes, and strategy use in divergent thinking

“…Uniqueness scoring has many virtues: it is straightforward, and it doesn't require more than one rater to do it. Other popular methods offer variations on uniqueness scoring, such as creating a list of common responses and giving points for each response not on the list (Torrance, 2008) and giving points for responses not mentioned by 5% or 10% of the sample (see Michael & Wright, 1989). …”

Creative Abilities

“…Runco, Okuda, and Thurstone (1987) compared four scoring systems and found that weighted fluency scores, with higher weights given to more rare ideas, were superior to the summation scores (sum of flexibility, fluency, and originality scores), common/uncommon (uncommon  generated by less than 5% of the sample), and the ratio scores (originality or flexibility divided by fluency). Limiting the number of responses (Michael and Wright, 1989;Zarnegar, Hocevar, & Michael, 1988) has also been used to diminish the influence of fluency. One thing that is often overlooked is that, if one score was to be used because of high correlations and overlap, it should be originality and not fluency.…”

Who is creative? Identifying children's creative abilities

“…Moreover, performance elicited by divergent thinking measures is unlikely to reflect a high degree of personal commitment that is typical for self-initiated products. M any of the early measures were developed and normed in the 1960s before the advent of better psychometric procedures (Hong & Milgram, 1991;Michael & Wright, 1989;Runco, 1993a). One of these, the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT, Torrance, 1990;Torrance & Ball, 1984) is the most extensively researched (Cramond, 1994(Cramond, , 1998Davis, 1997), and provides adequate updated norms.…”

“…The unique technical concerns for measuring creative behaviors are discussed elsewhere (e.g., Johnson & Fishkin, 1998;Michael & Wright, 1989;Runco, 1993a). Given the complex nature of creative behavior that is commonly expressed in a variety of ways (e.g.…”

“…For many of the instruments presented in Table 2, the norm population is poorly described, is not representative of the grade/age level nor of the specific subpopulation with whom the measure will be used, and is frequently not current. Norming procedures should be based upon a representative sample throughout the age/grade range (floor to ceiling) of each subtest (Michael & Wright, 1989). Despite these limitations, Wakefield (1987) stated that creativity instruments should be evaluated by the quality of existing creativity measures and should not be judged by the standards applied to intelligence or achievement tests.…”