Creative Ability over a Five-Year Span

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 137.52.76.Creative Ability over a Five-Year Span. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1972, 43, 427-442. Fifth-grade middle-class children whose levels of associative creativity had been assessed with the Wallach-Kogan tasks were retested on identical and similar tasks 5 years later in tenth grade. In the smaller of 2 school systems employed in the research, tenth-grade creativity data were obtained by an individual examiner; in the larger system, group administration was employed. Substantial stability in ideational productivity and uniqueness scores over a 5-year period was observed for males in the setting of group administration and for females in the context of individual testing. Creativity and IQ, which were unrelated at fifth-grade level, remained unrelated for females at tenth grade but became positively correlated for males. Multiple regression analysis indicated that fifth-and tenth-grade creativity and fifth-grade IQ accounted for approximately half of the variance in extracurricular activities in the CHILD DEVELOPMENT smaller school system. Predictability was considerably poorer in the larger school system. A possible interpretation of the differential predictability across school systems is offered. InModes of Thinking in Young Children, Wallach and Kogan (1965) demonstrated the essential independence of traditional intelligence measures from indices of associative creativity when the latter are assessed in a gamelike, nonevaluative context. Since the publication of that volume, a number of partial replications have appeared (e.g., Cropley & Maslany 1969; Pankove & Kogan 1968; Wallach & Wing 1969; Ward 1968), all supporting the original Wallach-Kogan conclusions concerning the creativity-intelligence distinction. It should be noted that the Wallach-Kogan research was based on a sample of American fifth-graders-children approximately 10-11 years of age. The partial replications cited above have extended the age generalizability of the observed creativity-intelligence distinction both downward and upward in age. The effects appear to be quite similar in nature from kindergarten through university levels. Furthermore, the effects seem to be generalizable across differences in social class (Ward, Kogan, & Pankove 1972). All of the foregoing research has been cross-sectional. The present investigation represents a first attempt to examine the long-term longitudinal stability of associative creativity when assessed with the Wallach-Kogan tasks.1 A subsample of the fifth-grade children studied by Pankove and Kogan (1968) was reexamined 5 years later in the tenth grade. Explored, in addition, were the relative independence of creativity and intelligence over the ...

Creativity and Sex Differences*

“…At the same time, evidence is accumulating that divergent thinking (particularly ideational fluency) accounts for at least more than a negligible portion of the variance in activities and accomplishments of talented persons (.beyond the contribution of IQ). Typical of relevant studies are Wallach and Wing (1969) for concurrent validation, and Cropley (1972) and Kogan and Pankove (1972) for long-term predictive validation. Since it is quite clear that divergent-thinking test performance predicts appropriate external criteria only to a modest extent, the evidence for the absence of sex differences in "creativity potential" can obviously not be generalized to the domain of actual creative behavior.…”

“…Conclusions must be held in abeyance until relevant longitudinal data become available. In a recent longitudinal study, Kogan & Pankove (1972) employed a sample of tenth-grade adolescents who had initially been tested five years previously in the fifth grade. At that earlier time, all of the children had been examined individually.…”

The Development of Ideational Fluency: Some Normative Data

“…The British Abi/ity Scales (Elliott et al, 1978) include some very broad age norms for the Verbal Nirency measure, and some workers (e.g., Alpaugh et al, 1976;Jaquish and Ripple, 1981) have investigated changes in creative thinking abilities across the adult life-span. Although some longitudinal studies have been made of the predictive validity of divergent tests (e.g., Torrance, 1969;Cropley, 1972), Kogan and Pankove's (1972) experiment is one of the very few in the literature that has specifically investigated age-related changes in children's performance on these tests (which the authors equate with ' creative ability '). They retested samples of 10-year-old middle-class schoolchildren after a 5-year period in an attempt to establish the longitudinal stability of Wallach and Kogan's (1965) measures of ideational productivity and uniqueness.…”

Educating divergent thinkers: An ecological investigation

“…Divergent thinking tests were Uses for Things (Guilford, 1959) and Picture Meanings (Wallach & Kogan, 1965). These tests were chosen because of established reliabiiities (Cropley & Maslany, 1969;Kogan & Pankove, 1972;Wagner, 1972), and because of factorial evidence that these tests are sufficient to obtain a reliable estimate of divergent ability (Hargreaves & Bolton, 1972). The correlation between the two tests was r = .62 in the present study.…”