What a test measures is a function not only of the items on the test, but also of the testing conditions. This study examined the effects of varying instructions and response time in testing for divergent thinking (DT) on both the level of performance and the intercorrelations of D T subscores with each other and with I&. Christensen, Guilford, and Wilson (1957) varied the instructions and the time allowed for completing D T tasks. They found that subjects told to "be clever" responded with more high quality, clever responses, but fewer total responses, than subjects not so instructed. When more time was allowed the rate and level of cleverness remained relatively constant, while the remoteness and uncommonness of the responses increased. hqanske and Davis (1968) extended the findings of Christensen, Guilford, and Wilson (1957) by asking some subjects to be "original," others to be "practical," a third group to be "original and practical," and a fourth to be "wild." Control subjects were given nonspecific directions. The responses of subjects instructed to be original were rated by judges to be more original but less practical than the control group. The subjects instructed to be practical gave practical and common responses. The subjects instructed to be both original and practical gave responses similar to those of the control group in originality and practicality. However, they gave fewer total responses than the control group. When subjects were told to be wild, they gave the largest total number of responses. There was a moderate tendency for responses occurring later in the order of emission to be rated as more original than those emitted earlier.Wallach and Kogan (1965) reviewed the literature on the relationship between D T and intelligence and concluded that there was no clear evidence of a unitary creativity factor as measured by the usual array of D T tasks. Further, the relatively high correlations between I& and D T measures did not allow the interpretation that I& and DT (as measured) are orthogonal. They studied the effects of removing evaluative stress from D T measures by testing individuals in a game-like atmosphere. Under conditions of low evaluative stress most of the intercorrelations among the D T tests were significant and substantial, and the correlations of D T measures with I& measures tended to be low and not significant. Thus, changes in the DT testing situation resulted in changes in the relationships among DT measures and between D T and IQ.Ward (1966), Boersma and O'Bryan (1968), Williams and Fleming (in press), McGuire, Hindsman, King, and Jennings (196l), Clark, Veldman, and Thorpe (1965), Kogan and Morgan (1967), Connett and Lyon (1969), and Wallach and Wing (1969) have provided evidence supporting the Wallach and Kogan finding that under conditions of low evaluative stress, creativity measures (expecially measures of ideational fluency and uniqueness) correlate highly with each other and tend to be statistically independent of I&. From the literature it is clear that changes in ...
Ss were given a series of learning trials with stimulus materials of differing degrees of meaningfulness and redundancy using three modes of presentation. All Ss received one list of the stimulus materials through an auditory presentation, one list visually and one list audio-visually. Forty-eight Ss learned lists of nonsense syllables, 48 learned lists of common words, and 48 learned lists of words with constraint. One-fourth of each group received the stimuli at the rate of one each 4 sec., one-fourth at the rate of one each 2 sec., one-fourth at a 1-sec. rate, and one-fourth at one stimulus each .6 sec. There were no significant differences between the visual and audio-visual modes of presentation across all three types of stimulus material, although at the shorter stimulus exposure times a slight trend was observed for the audio-visual mode to be inferior to the visual. When the stimulus material was nonsense syllables, the auditory mode of presentation produced learning inferior to the other two ( p < .001), but the visual and audio-visual modes were similar.
Tests involving word span, memory for verbal details, memory for visual details, and the Minnesota Tests of Creative Thinking (MTCT) were administered to 63 Ss in grades 4, 5, and 6. IQs were obtained from school records. Only 1 of 8 correlations between IQ and divergent thinking (DT) scores was significant, but 11 of 48 correlations between memory and DT were significant. In stepwise multiple correlation of the memory scores on each DT score, 17 of 19 predictor variables in reduced sets were memory scores. Canonical correlation of the memory and the DT scores yielded an R of .61. Results were interpreted to support the hypothesis that certain memory abilities may play important roles in DT.
AhstraetFifty-seven subjects wrote synonyms to stimulus words of high, moderate and low word frequency selected from the Lorge-Thorndike lists. High stimulus words tended to elicit synonym responses of higher word frequency than did moderate and low words. In addition, mean word frequency of the responses was shown to be a decreasing function of list position of the response. ProhlemIn verbal learning studies involving recall, the effects of word frequency, familiarity and association value are not completely understood. Deese (1961) doubts that word frequency is related to the free recall of words, and argues that once a word is well integrated it should be readily recalled regardless of word frequency. Cofer (1961), on the other hand, suggests that "response availability" probably would be due to frequency of prior experience. Noble (1953), using dissyllables, found that familiarity (estimated prior experience with the dis syllables) was highly correlated (.92) with associational m-values; and he suggests that both "familiarity" and "meaning" may be functions of the frequency of occurrencl'l in an organism's history. Noble also calls attention tD Thorndike's observation that the frequency of a word's appearance in writing is positively correlated with the number of synonyms for that word in the English language.The purpose of this experiment was to investigate the telationship between the word frequency of both the stimuius and the response in a synonym recall situation. It was hypothesized that the higher the word frequency of the stimulus word, the higher the word frequency of the synonyms that would be elicited. It was further hypothesized that mean word frequency of the synonym responses would be a decreasing function of list poSition, Le., initial synonym responses to a given stimulus word would be of higher mean word frequency than would later responses. MethodFifty-seven students enrolled in an educational psychology class comprised the sample.Nine stimulus words were obtained from the LorgeThorndike (1944) list. Three Hi stimulus words (seem, ship, high) occurred more than 100 times in one million. Three Mod stimulus words (hasten, jewel, steep) occurred 40-41 times per million. Three Lo stimulus words (invest, operator, pinch) occurred less than 20 times per million. Subjects were given a booklet containing the nine stimulus words, each on a separate page, and attempted to write as many synonyms as possible during the standard 2-min. interval allowed to each word. In order to minimize associative chaining of responses, each stimulus word was reproduced 15 times on the page with a space provided under each word for the subject's response.The synonym responses to each word were assigned a "word frequency" score based on the Lorge-Thorndike counts, using the following Results and Discussion 1-24o or lower
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