Creativity
–Meaning
•
Process
of creating something that is original and worthwhile
•
May
refer to
•
The
product
•
The
person\personality creating the product
•
The
process
•
Steps
followed to create the product
•
The
environment
•
A
synthesis of all of the above
•
Creativity
is the generation of ideas that are both novel and valuable. (Boden)
•
A
creative idea is one that is both original and appropriate for the situation in
which it occurs.(Martindale)
•
Creativity
from a Western perspective can be defined as the ability to produce work that
is novel and appropriate. (Lubart)
• Definition of
creativity (conceptual): Mental process
involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations
between existing ideas or concepts.
• Definition of
creativity (scientific): Cognitive process leading to original and
appropriate outcomes.
• Similar
concepts:
divergent
vs. convergent thinking
(induction
vs. deduction)
Dimensions
of Divergent Thinking (Guilford, 1950)
•fluidity (number of ideas)
– Ideation: listing red round objects
– Association: Fog is … like a sponge
– Expression: listing words ending with -ism
• flexibility (number of content categories / shifts)
– Spontaneous: listing uses of a pencil
– Adaptive: What would happen if nobody could or would
like to sleep anymore?
• originality (ideas just mentioned by one
participant)
• elaboration (number of ideas per content category)
From Aristotle to Stenberg, creativity has been
associated to intelligence as being one of three main components:
– Analytic intelligence: analyse, critique, judge,
compare, evaluate, assess, ...
– Practical intelligence: apply, use, put into
practice, implement, employ, ...
– Synthetic (or creative) intelligence: create,
invent, discover, imagine if, suppose that, predict, ...
Robert
Sternberg’s Five Components of
Creativity
Creative
environment: having
support, feedback, encouragement, and time and space to think
Venturesome
personality: tending
to seek out new experiences despite risk, ambiguity, and obstacles
Intrinsic motivation: enjoying the pursuit of interests
and challenge, without needing external
direction or rewards
Expertise: possessing a well-developed
base of knowledge
Imaginative
thinking: having
the ability to see new perspectives, combinations, and connections
Components
of individual and team creativity include
Domain-relevant
skills: the capacity to perform a given task
Creativity-relevant
skills: the capacity to approach things in novel ways
Intrinsic
task motivation: the motivation to do work because it is
interesting, engaging, or positively challenging
Stages of creative process
-preparation
-incubation
-illumination
-verification
■ 1) Preparation:
The time for research, fact gathering, assembling materials, gathering needed
information before the creative act.
■ 2) Incubation:
This is the period of gestation, of letting go so that the mind, the unconscious,
intuition, and emotion can mull over the information and put it into its own
original perspective. Dreaming may be a part of this period.
■ 3) Inspiration:
The "Aha!" when the solution, illumination, or discovery either
emerges or forces itself through into a coalesced form.
■ 4) Evaluation or
confirmation: This is the time to ask, Will it work, does it hold up next to
other theories,
Factors of creative thinking
Creative thinking is characterized by
sensitivity lo problems, fluency and flexibility of thinking, originality, ability
to analyse and synthesize and the ability to redefine things (Guilford).
Factors
Individual level
Age
– creativity decreases with age unless
individual is intentionally creative
Intelligence-
certain level required for certain measures of creativity only.
Personality-
high valuation of aesthetic qualities in
experiences, interests, attraction to complexity, independence of judgment,
autonomy, intuition , self confidence, ability to resolve conflicting traits in
self and belief that self is creative
Dispositions-
high level of intrinsic motivation,
follow intrinsic interests, free from evaluations and constraints
Capabilities -- Insight is a result of integration of
previously learned behaviors potential.
Demographic factors
•
Birth
order
•
Middle
born children are more creative
•
family size
•
Number
of siblings
•
Interval
among siblings
•
Family
and school atmosphere
•
Large
families have authoritarian structures
•
Freedom
and autonomy facilitates creativity
Resources influencing
creativity
•
Time
•
Original
ideas are remote with respect to original problem
•
Creative
ideas require time for incubation
Neurological
factors
•
Creativity
reflects originality and appropriateness, intuition and logic. It requires both
hemispheres
•
Requires
consistent communication among many areas in brain and increased emotional
expression
•
Defocused
attention
•
Knowledge
–declarative, factual, tactics or procedural knowledge
•
Intuition,
ability to consider two different perspectives simultaneously, incubation,
imagination
Creativity tests- Guilford, Torrance
Creativity tests are
aimed at assessing the qualities and abilities that constitute creativity.
These tests evaluate mental abilities in ways that are different from
conventional intelligence tests. Because the kinds of abilities measured by
creativity tests differs from those measured by intelligence tests.
Most creativity tests
in use today are based at least partially on the theory of creativity evolved
by J.P. Guilford in the 1950s. Guilford posited that the ability to envision
multiple solutions to a problem lay at the core of creativity. He called this
process divergent thinking and its opposite—the tendency to narrow all options
to a single solution—convergent thinking. Guilford identified three components
of divergent thinking: fluency (the ability to quickly find multiple solutions
to a problem); flexibility (being able to simultaneously consider a variety of
alternatives); and originality (referring to ideas that differ from those of
other people). Early tests designed to assess an individual's aptitude for
divergent thinking included the Torrance (1962) and Meeker (1969) tests.
There are two tests that have been used
extensively in creativity research, and both have reasonable reliability and
validity:
(a) Guilford Test of Divergent Thinking
(Guilford & Hoepfner, 1971)
(b) Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking
(TTCT) (Torrance, 1974)
Guilford
Test of Creative Thinking. Based on his factor analytic model of
the structure-of-intellect (SI), Guilford and his associates in the University
of Southern California Aptitudes Research Project developed tests of divergent
thinking (Guilford & Hoepfner, 1971). Of the 13 tests in this battery, 9
require verbal (semantic) responses and 4 employ figural content. The 9 verbal
response tests are: (1) Word Fluency; (2) Ideational Fluency; (3) Association Fluency;
(4) Expressional Fluency; (5) Alternate Uses; (6) Simile Interpretations; (7)
Plot Titles; (8) Consequences; and (9) Possible Jobs. The four figural tests
are: (1) Making Objects; (2) Sketches; (3) Match Problems; and (4) Decorations.
Recent research has partially confirmed his factor structure (Bachelor &
Michael, 1991; Michael & Bachelor, 1990).
Scorer reliability and split-half
reliability coefficients are satisfactory for these tests (Anastasi, 1982).
Norms in terms of percentiles and standard scores are provided in the
preliminary manuals (Anastasi, 1982, p. 387). Guilford and his associates have
also developed a battery of creativity tests for children, with 5 verbal
(semantic) and 5 figural tests in this battery. The authors have provided test
norms for Grades 4 through 6. See Guilford and Hoepfner (1971) for detailed
description and sample items of these tests.
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Torrance Tests
of Creative Thinking.
The highly reliable Torrance® Tests of Creative Thinking are
the most widely used tests of their kind since testing only requires the
examinee to reflect upon their life experiences. These tests invite examinees
to draw and give a title to their drawings (pictures) or to write questions,
reasons, consequences and different uses for objects (words). These
instruments have been used for identification of the creatively gifted and as
a part of gifted matrices in states and districts in the USA, especially in
multicultural settings, and for special populations around the world.
Published in two equivalent forms, Forms A and B, the Figural and Verbal
TTCT can be used for pre- and posttesting.
Figural TTCT®: Thinking
Creatively with Pictures
The Figural TTCT: Thinking Creatively with Pictures is appropriate at all levels, kindergarten through adult. It uses three picture-based exercises to assess five mental characteristics: |
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The Figural TTCT can be scored locally or by STS. Both methods employ the streamlined scoring procedure. Streamlined scoring provides standardized scores for the mental characteristics listed above as well as for the following creative strengths: |
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With Figural
TTCT Streamlined Scoring two different norm types are available:
grade-related norms and age-related norms. Grade-related norms use one
set of norms for each of the grades for which the test is appropriate,
including the adult level. Age-related norms are based on the typical age for
each of the grades in which the Figural TTCT may be used.
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Creativity
and Intelligence
Creativity and Intelligence are related,
but also opposed to each other in a certain way. Traditional analysis of
relations between intelligence and creativity have focused on whether one is a
subset of the other; whether they are correlated and found significantly more often
together than by themselves; and whether one (high IQ) is a necessary condition
or prerequisite for the other (creativity) - the threshold theory of
creativity.
•
What is intelligence?
–
Adaptive thinking or behavior (Piaget)
–
Ability to think abstractly, solve problems? (Sternberg)
•
Global capacity to act purposefully, think rationally, and deal
effectively with the environment
•
Operational Definition: Specifies what procedures we will use to
measure a concept
Some Intelligence Quotient (IQ) Terms
•
Binet (1857-1911) and
Simon created 1st IQ ← test in 1905
•
Norm: Average score
for a designated group of people
•
Chronological Age:
Person’s age in years
•
Mental Age: Average
intellectual performance
•
Intelligence Quotient
(IQ): Intelligence index; original definition; mental age divided by
chronological age, then multiplied by 100
•
Deviation IQ: Scores
based on a person’s standing in his or her age group; how far above or below
average a person’s score is, relative to other scores
•
Average IQ in the
U.S.: 100
Overall IQ and also verbal and performance IQs.
•
(WPPSI-III)
Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Revised. Ages 2 ½ to 7
years, 3 months
•
(WISC-IV) Wechsler Intelligence Scale for
Children-Revised. Ages 6 to 16 years, 11 months
•
(WAIS-III)
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised
•
Ages 16-89
•
Raven’s Progressive
Matrices
–
Psychologists created
“culture-reduced” tests without language.
It tests abstract reasoning ability (non-verbal intelligence or
performance IQ)
- Savant
Syndrome
- condition in which a person otherwise limited
in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill
- Calculation abilities
- Drawing
- Musical
Creativity is
sometimes broken up into divergent thinking and convergent thinking. Divergent
thinking is measured using Torrance test of creative thinking (TTCT)
TTCT consist of both verbal and figural parts. Divergent thinking is also
measured by Guilford's Alternate uses task n which one has to come up with as
many uses as possible for a common household item. . These creativity test
results are scored keeping in mind a number of different creativity criteria.
The most common (common to all of the above) criteria are:
1. Fluency: which captures the ability to come up with many diverse ideas quickly. This is measured by the total number of ideas generated. I call this the speed of ideation
2. Flexibility: which captures the ability to cross boundaries and make remote associations. This is measured by number of different categories of ideas generated. I call this the breadth of ideation.
3. Originality: which measures how statistically different or novel the ideas are compared to a comparison group. His is measured as number of novel ideas. I call this the uniqueness /novelty of ideation.
4. Elaboration: which measure the amount of detail associated with the idea. This I think is not relevant to creativity per se (as per my limited definition of creativity) , but elaboration has more to do with focussing on each solution/idea and developing it further - perhaps a responsibility more in alignment with that of Intelligence. I call this depth of ideation.
Convergent thinking is measured by tests like remote associations test or insight problems. These problems are solved when you apply one of the methods below:
1. See problem from a different perspective. To me this looks like how quickly you can adopt multiple perspectives - the speed with which you can take alternate perspectives and is similar to fluency.
2. Make unique association between parts of the problem. This looks again similar to flexibility or how fluid is your categorisation schema enabling you to think out of the box and not be limited by typical categories or associations.
3. Take a novel approach (and not the typical approach) to problem solving. To me, this again looks similar to Originality.
Creativity is also defined as coming up with something that is both novel and useful.
Defining
what is creative: creativity = utility + beauty+
novelty.
1. The first factor is of UTILITY: whether one
produces something that is useful.
2. The second factor is BEAUTY: whether one
produces something that is appealing and aesthetically satisfying.
3.
The third factor is NOVELTY:
whether one produces something that is really unique and novel and unheard of
before.
4. The fourth factor is VERIDCIALITY: whether what
one has come up with is TRUE/ replicable/verifiable. Intelligence is the
ability to see if the solution actually solves the problem.
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