Defining and measuring creativity: Are creativity tests worth using?

Headnote

Creativity tests measure specific cognitive processes such as thinking divergently, making associations, constructing and combining broad categories, or working on many ideas simultaneously. They also measure noncognitive aspects of creativity such as motivation (e.g., impulse expression, desire for novelty, risk-taking), and facilitatory personal properties like flexibility, tolerance for independence, or positive attitudes to differentness. Raters can score the various kinds of test with substantial levels of agreement, while scores are internally stable to an acceptable degree. The tests also correlate to a reasonable degree with various criteria of creativity such as teacher ratings, and are useful predictors of adult behavior. Thus, they are useful in both research and education. However, they are best thought of as measures of creative potential because creative achievement depends on additional factors not measured by creativity tests, such as technical skill, knowledge of a field, mental health, or even opportunity. However, the multidimensional creativity concept they define indicates that assessments should be based on several tests, rather than relying on a single score.

Kaltsounis and Honeywell (e.g., 1980) published a substantial list of creativity tests, and Torrance and Goff (1989) identified no fewer than 255 such instruments. Although there is obviously no shortage of tests, many reviewers have questioned their usefulness, usually on the grounds of technical shortcomings, although they do not dismiss them out of hand (Hocevar, 1981; Hocevar & Bachelor, 1989; Cooper, 1991). This article examines a few of the tests, emphasizing the contents they measure and the consistency with which they measure them. The number of tests in existence made it necessary to restrict coverage to instruments specifically referring to creativity that were developed during the modern creativity era introduced by Guilford (1950). The review is also restricted to paper-and-pencil tests because these are most widely used in education and research. It covers a mixture of well-known and little-known procedures, but cannot do more than give some idea of the range of instruments that exist. The contents are organized in terms of creativity-related concepts (e.g., creative products, creative processes, creative person). At the end of the article the dimensions of creativity that emerge from the tests are presented in tabular form (see Table 1), and their psychometric properties summarized (see Table 2).

Creative Products

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