Below are links to stories that discuss creativity:
Creativity Test: The Alternative Use Test
You have two minutes to think of as many uses as possible for a paper clip.
Now that your two minutes are up, add up how many uses you came up with.
What does this test do?
This test measures divergent thinking, the thought process used to generate creative ideas by exploring many options. It measures divergent thinking in four ways:
- Fluency: how many uses you can come up with
- Originality: how uncommon those uses are (using a paper clip to unclog a sink is more original than using one to hold papers together)
- Flexibility: how many areas your answers cover (having all your answers be ways of using paper clips as jewelry does not demonstrate flexibility)
- Elaboration: level of detail in responses
History of this test:
This test was developed by J.P. Guilford in 1967. Guilford was a psychologist who worked at many universities including the University of Southern California. He was at USC for 20 years. Guilford developed many creativity tests after being asked by the U.S. Army Air Force (where he was a Lieutenant Colonel) to find ways of predicting who would be a good pilot.
Guilford developed the Alternative Use Test to measure divergent thinking/creativity and found that people who were more creative made better pilots. The Alternative Use Test is not the only creativity test Guilford developed, but the one most easily duplicated.
Guilford’s research was used in personnel assessments/qualifying exams in all branches of the U.S. Armed Services in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.
Ken Robinson: Schools Kill Creativity
Sir Ken Robinson has the most watched TED talk of all time with almost 26 million views. Robinson is a world renowned advisor on creativity in education.
From 2:45-6:05, Robinson discusses his views on creativity and education.
In this video and two other TED talks Robinson has given on creativity in education, Robinson argues that schools kill creativity, which should be promoted instead.
Education System Not Conducive To Creativity
Creativity is defined as the ability to think of new ideas, patterns or relationships. In short, creativity is the ability to be unique or original.
Standardized test have long been a part of our education system. With the introduction of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, however, some say their importance increased. The No Child Left Behind Act requires states to test basic skills in order to receive federal school funding.
As a result, some teachers have started “teaching to the test,” or teaching skills that will allow students to do well on standardized tests and are not teaching other things like creativity.
“There’s no question that the way that schools are recognized and rewarded right now have nothing to do with students creative endeavors, so I think that there is less. There is such an intense focus on math and reading that teachers have reasonably responded to that by taking the focus away from the arts,” said Morgan Polikoff, an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California.
Frederick Freking, an associate professor of clinical education, agreed. He argued that teachers teach to a test that does not promote higher thinking or creativity.
“The problem is that a lot of the more standardized tests don’t require you to have a higher level of thinking. Therefore, teachers who are teaching to that kind of test, they promote more recall, instead of higher level types of thinking,” Freking said.
Polikoff added that while it is “very believable that that kind of drill and kill reduces creativity” there have not yet been any studies that show this to be true.
Instead, he argued that a lot of the technology, such as iPads, used in the classroom can be used for creative purposes.
Kyung-Hee Kim, an assistant professor of education at The College of William and Mary, however, conducted a survey (released in 2011) that shows that the U.S.’s scores on the Torrance Tests, the most common creativity tests, have been decreasing since 1990. The study shows that creativity has been decreasing, even though it does not offer an explanation as to why.
Lloyd Armstrong, a professor of education and physics at USC, thinks it is not just standardized tests, but the U.S.’s education system in general that is having a negative affect on creativity.
“Any kind of school that you walk through with grades is detrimental to creativity,” Armstrong said.
He argued that to get into top universities, students need perfect grades. And to get perfect grades failure is not an option, which “is one of the most important things to creativity” and “very important to your development.”
Students who are afraid of failure cannot be creative.
Parents, not just teachers, he argued “don’t allow failure.” Parents today, he said, think every student should get straight “As” and be rewarded just for showing up to school. They do not allow their kids to experience any discomfort.
“We need to break away from this idea that everyone should have an “A” and everything’s aright,” Armstrong said. “Frustration, although uncomfortable, is necessary.”
Freking agreed and said that failure is particularly important in science where “you learn from a failed experiment.”
Armstrong argued that while creativity is not taught today, there are ways to teach it. Despite the lack of creativity education, he still feels that the American population is pretty creative.
“We built a system that’s not conducing creativity so the fact that we remain creative says a lot about the talent of our people,” Armstrong said.
Can You Teach Creativity?
When most people think of subjects taught at school, they think of math and English, not creativity.
Lloyd Armstrong, a professor of education and physics at the University of Southern California, however, argued that it should be an important part of schooling.
In order to teach creativity, schools need to teach students to understand domain relevance (understand problems and solutions in a given area), creative relevance and be motivated by their teachers, he argued.
“We don’t teach that at any level even though it’s well known how to do that,” Armstrong said.
He added that one of the easiest ways to add creativity to current curriculums is by encouraging students to make connections between different subjects.
“We also tend to march through in lock step; when we study history we’re not encouraged to connect it to something in economics or other subjects, which forms subject boundaries,” Armstrong said.
Schools need to teach critical thinking and then formal reasoning, he argued.
“Our education system is a total failure at teaching these things,” he said, because “no one wants to take the effort to do these things.”
In addition to encouraging students to make connections between different subjects, we also need to ask formal reasoning questions such as how to solve the energy crisis. At the moment, “students are remarkably unprepared to answer those questions,” Armstrong said.
Changes Coming To Core Standards May Promote Creativity
No Child Left Behind, which was introduced in 2001, was meant to hold schools accountable for teaching their students basic skills. Many, though, have argued it has many flaws, has led to “teaching to the test” and does not encourage other kinds of thinking.
Morgan Polikoff, an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California, said the real problem is that “the test is really bad.”
“There’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of teaching to the test if it was a good test,” Polikoff said.
Standardized tests are usually bubble test because they are cheap, easy and fast to score.
“There are two main problems with current tests: one is the form of the test. These tests have been basically exclusively multiple choice and as a result teachers have focused on a multiple choice way of thinking, so that’s one problem and that’s relatively easily solvable if we diversify the kind of items we have on the test,” Polikoff said. “The other major problem is about the content of the test. The tests have been really exclusively focused on procedural skills. Again, that’s led teachers to focus on those kind of skills.”
Frederick Freking, an associate professor of clinical education at USC, agreed that there are many flaws with the test. He added, however, that changes are being developed that will help.
“The assessments are getting better and that’s going to require teachers to develop critical thinking skills with their students,” Freking said.
He added that new tests are being worked on, including a science test, that will place more importance on critical thinking and creativity.
“Teachers are going to have to develop instruction that’s going to promote students to be able to think more like a scientist and creativity is a huge part of thinking like a scientist,” Freking said.
Creativity Is Different In Different Cultures And Times
While skills like grammar and arithmetic may be easy to test, creativity is not. While there are numerous creativity tests, it is hard to truly measure someone’s creative ability.
“The difficulty with creativity is that it’s very difficult to define and test,” said Lloyd Armstrong, a professor of education and physics at the University of Southern California.
He added that society defines whether something is creative. So, the definition of creativity changes with the times and culture present.
Armstrong said that in creativity tests, test-takers are compared to people who were previously deemed creative.
He added that it is difficult to measure a person’s level of creativity until much later when there are other ideas to compare it to.
Armstrong said that whether something is creative is also dependent on the society which is judging it.
Kyung-Hee Kim, an assistant professor of education at The College of William and Mary, told the Encyclopedia Britannica’s blog that there is well documented research that people in different cultures view creativity differently.
People from the West, she argued, think of creativity as artistic ability whereas people from the East think of creativity as scientific ability.
Michael W. Morris, the Chavkin-Chang Professor of Leadership at Columbia and a Chazen Senior Scholar, also studied the difference between creativity in the East and West.
He argued that Westerners are more individualistic and try to come up with solutions that are completely unique. Easterners work as a group and “encourage harmony and not making waves. As a result, there’s more attention to make a solution useful—easy to implement, easy for people to accept and to understand,” he told the Columbia Business School.
Westerners generally works at developing new technologies, and Eastern societies work at improving existing ones, he argued.
As Armstrong stated, how creative something is is judged by society as a whole, which makes it easy to see why Eastern and Western societies might view creativity differently.
Creativity Test: The Incomplete Figure Test
You have three minutes to add lines to the figures below to make pictures out of them. Try to tell a story with your pictures and give each picture a title.
What does this test do?
This test was first developed to measure creativity in a similar way to The Alternative Use Test. It also looked at:
- Fluency: how many relevant ideas you have
- Flexibility: number of categories your ideas fit into
- Originality: how uncommon your drawing is
- Elaboration: how detailed your drawing is
In 1984, a new version of the test was developed that eliminated flexibility as a scoring mechanism. It added two new ideas:
- Resistance to Premature Closure: how open minded your drawing is, this measures curiosity
- Abstractness of Titles: how original your title is (“Brad Pitt’s Mansion” would score higher than “House”), this measures synthesis and organization
History of this test:
The Incomplete Figure Test is part of the larger Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, which was developed by Ellis Paul Torrance in 1966. The test was updated in 1974, 1984, 1990, 1998 and 2008. Today, it is the most used creativity test in the world and predicts creative achievement better than any other creativity test. There are many different elements to the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, but the Incomplete Figure Test is the most famous.
Test results show creativity is decreasing:
The College of William and Mary’s Kyung-Hee Kim conducted a study (released in 2011) that found that the U.S.’s scores on the Torrance Test have been decreasing since 1990. The study found that creativity is decreasing across all age groups. Kim examined 300,000 Torrance tests as part of the study.
The study found that many aspects of creativity have decreased in the past 20 years:
- Fluency: decreased 4.68 percent from 1990 to 1998 and 7 percent from 1990 to 2008
- Originality: decreased 3.74 percent from 1990 to 1998 and remained static from 1998 to 2008
- Creative Strengths (traits associated with creativity such as imagination, passion and seeing things from a different angle): decreased 3.16 percent from 1990 to 1998 and 5.75 percent from 1990 to 2008
- Elaboration: decreased 19.41 percent from 1984 to 1990, 24.6 percent from 1984 to 1998 and 36.8 percent from 1984 to 2008
- Abstractness of Titles: increased until 1998, then decreased 7.4 percent from 1998 to 2008
- Resistance to Premature Closure: decreased from 1984 to 1990, increased from 1990 to 1998 and decreased 1.8 percent from 1998 to 2008
Kim said more research needed to be done in order to find an explanation for the decrease.
A Study In Creativity 