Conditions for administering creativity tests.

Abstract

Research relating to the testing conditions under which open-ended creativity tests are administered is reviewed. Wallach and Kogan's influential arguments as to the necessity for untimed game-like conditions are outlined and criticized. Conditions other than the untimed game-like condition are found to be unsatisfactory alternatives to the timed test-like condition. Finally, criteria for assessing the adequacy of various conditions are outlined. It is concluded that there is little evidence against using timed test-like conditions as the norm for administering creativity tests.The aim of this article is to discuss the research literature relating to the testing conditions under which creativity is commonly measured. At present there are two major approaches to testing creative abilities.One approach uses open-ended tests, and the general format is one in which a question is asked or a task presented and the subject has to respond with as many creative or original ideas as he can (e.g., Guilford, 1959;Torrance, 1966; Wallach & Kogan, 1965). The second approach employs closed measures that have very specific instructions, generally requiring one answer per item. The usual format of this latter approach is multiple-choice questions (e.g., Christie, cited in Butcher, 1968) or word association (e.g., S. A. Mednick & M. T. Mednick, 1967). This review does not intend to center around the merits or deficiencies of the various methods; the interested reader is referred to Wodtke (1964) and Dewing (1970) for criticism of open-ended tests and to Taft and Rossiter (1966) and Worthen and Clarke (1971) for criticisms of the closed approach. The present review concentrates on the conditions for administering creativity tests. Evidence for Untimed Game-like ConditionsWallach and Kogan (1965) examined, by means of a literature review, the evidence Requests for reprints should be sent to John A. Hattie, Centre for Behavioural Studies in Education,

Creativity, Intelligence, and Personality

“…Hom 1976 andRichards 1976) is a reasonable estimate of central tendency, it must be recalled that the actual DT X IQ rs vary widely depending upon the nature of the DT tests, the heterogeneity of the sample, and apparently the nature of the testing situation. (For reviews of research dealing with this latter point, see Hattie 1977Hattie , 1980 The possibility that IQ may be a prerequisite to DT performance was proposed by Guilford (1967) and studied by examining relevant scatterplots for triangularity (Guilford 1967, Guilford & Christensen 1973, Schubert 1973, Richards 1976. While this line of investigation is far from conclusive, some DT and IQ scatterplots do seem to form a quasi-triangle compatible with Guilford's hypothesis.…”

“…TRATION A great deal of attention has been devoted in the last several years to the question of optimal DT test instructions and test conditions (see Hattie 1977Hattie , 1980 for recent reviews). Most of this work has focused on conditions needed to generate DT scores which are as weakly correlated with general intelligence measures as possible or on conditions which maxi mize raw fluency or uniqueness scores.…”

Creativity, Intelligence, and Personality: A Critical Review of the Scattered Literature

“…A review of the evidence of the importance of game-like conditions has indicated that there are no differences in the correlations between creativity and intelligence relating to the conditions of measurement (Hattie, 1977). Hattie (1980) administered five DT tests and a measure of IQ to 11-year-old students under both untimed, game-like conditions and timed, test-like conditions.…”

Methodological Issues in Measuring Creativity: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Individuals' performance on instruments measuring creativity appears to be influenced by the conditions under which these instruments are administered (Beghetto, 2005;Hattie, 1977Hattie, , 1980Plucker & Renzulli, 1999;Runco & Albert, 1985;). …”

“…There has been a great deal of research on the optimal conditions for administering creativity instruments (see Chen et al, 2005;Hattie 1977;Lemons, 2011). This body of research has been concerned with comparing different testing conditions, including atmosphere (test-like vs. game-like), time limit (timed vs. untimed), setting (individual vs. group) and instruction (explicit "be creative" vs. standard) (Plucker & Renzulli, 1999).…”