Screening and Identifying Students Talented in the Visual Arts: Clark's Drawing Abilities Test

Abstract

Categories of giftedness derived from the influential Marland Report (1972) include students who are gifted in the visual and performing arts. The research reported here describes development, testing, and use of a new instrument, Clark's Drawing Abilities Test, and its success in screening and/or identifying students for a visual arts program for artistically gifted students. The test was admmistered along with the Childrdn's Embedded Figures Test, and the results of both measures subsequently were compared to teacher ratings of students. Significant correlations were obtained among these three measures. Analyses of validity are reported here. Reliability is also reported as expressed in high correlatons among test items.

Early Predictors Of Creative Writing At Age 9

“…Several drawing tasks, assessing divergent thinking skills, have been developed to specifically measure and predict creativity in childhood (e.g. Clark, 1989;Torrance, 1974). For example, the figural component of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) is commonly used to predict creativity in children.…”

Talent identification and development in the arts:An artistic/educational dialogue

“…Reviews of these tests by arts specialists show that they are of limited usefulness as measures of art abilities (Clark & Zimmerman, 1984;Eisner, 1972). Art tests specifically designed for talent identification use a work-sample technique, and include Clark's DrawIng Abilities Test (Clark, 1989) and Hurwitz's eight art-centered tasks (Hurwitz, 1983). I n the field of music, standardized tests are available to measure music aptitude from kindergarten to college level (Bentley, 1966;Gordon, 1965Gordon, , 1979Gordon, , 1982.…”

Domain-Specificity of Creativity: A Study on the Relationship Between Visual Creativity and Visual Mental Imagery

“…The relationship between visual creativity products and visual mental imagery was investigated within Kosslyn’s (1980) theoretical framework, which sustains that three different cognitive processes underlie visual imagery: generation of mental images of visual stimuli previously learned; inspection of visual details within a mental image, and transformation of abstract representations before matching them with visual stimuli. To this end, the Creative Synthesis Task ( Finke, 1990 ), aimed at constructing creative objects, and Clark’s Drawing Ability Test ( Clark, 1989 ), aimed at making artistic drawings, were used. In addition, besides the tasks of generation, inspection and transformation of images, vividness of imagery was also measured to investigate the ability to represent pictorially visual images, and the verbalizer–visualizer cognitive (VVQ) style to investigate a personal general attitude toward visual mental imagery.…”