Creativity: Encyclopedia II - Creativity - Measuring creativity

Creativity - Measuring creativity

The ultimate test of a creativity is history. Highly creative works will survive the passage of time to remain in our memories: Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, Isaac Newton's Laws of Motion, Shakespeare's plays. Genrich Altshuller introduced approaching creativity as an exact science with TRIZ in the 1950s. The psychologist Robert Sternberg has proposed to apply the name creatology to scientific studies of creativity.

Creativity can be measured based on a response to a variety of test scenarios:

• Expressing ideas: the ability to easily develop and juggle an abundance of associations and phrases when presented with a single word or image.

• Combining ideas in a new way: developing a wide range of innovative solutions when asked to explore new possibilities for an everyday item (such as a brick).

• Finding new uses for existing ideas: generating an original idea or solution based on a suggested existing idea

• Expansion: the ability to work up a tentative idea into a practical solution.

• Focus and discrimination: recognizing the central challenge within an approach to a solution, while discounting any distracting minor elements, and then evaluating the difficulties.

• Perspective swapping: the ability to suggest ways of viewing a known problem from a completely different perspective.

J. P. Guilford's group constructed several tests to measure creativity:

• Plot Titles where participants are given the plot of a story and asked to write original titles.

• Quick Responses is a word association test scored for uncommonness.

• Figure Concepts where participants were given simple drawings of objects and individuals and asked to find qualities or features that are common by two or more drawings; these were scored for uncommonness.

• Unusual Uses is finding unusual uses for common everyday objects such as bricks.

• Remote Associations where participants are asked to find a word between two given words (e.g. Hand _____ Call)

• Remote Consequences where participants are asked to generate a list of consequences of unexpected events (e.g. loss of gravity)

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Measuring creativity", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki