Term Paper on Assessment of Creativity

Creativity is an extremely important human characteristic. Without doubt, it is the most critical element in human advancement. The ability to innovate, invent and solve problems has fascinated people for many centuries. This fascination, fueled by curiosity, has led people to research and find out about the nature of creative thinking, the distinguishing characteristics of a creative person, development of creativity across an individual’s life span, and the social environments associated with creative activity (Simonton, 2000).

In order to be creative, a person needs to be able to view things in new ways and from a different perspective. They should be able to generate new possibilities or new alternatives. Tests of creativity measure not only the number of alternatives that people can generate but the uniqueness of those alternatives. The ability to generate alternatives or to see things uniquely does not occur by change; it is linked to other, more fundamental qualities of thinking, such as flexibility, tolerance of ambiguity or unpredictability, and the enjoyment of things heretofore unknown (Franken,1994).

There are numerous ways of assessing creativity. These tests include tests of creativity such as Torrance’s Tests of Creative Thinking [TTCT] [Torrance & Ball, 1984] and expert judges' evaluations of creativity using criteria, assessment of product, process, person, or environment. An interesting evaluation method was developed by Amabile (1982) on the basis of an operational definition of creativity “a product or idea is creative to the extent that expert judges independently agree that it is creative”. The method is called Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT), since the assessment relies on a consensus of independent expert judges. Amabile conducted over 30 studies using this method and showed that CAT is a reliable method for assessing creativity of both children and adults (Amabile & Gitomer, 1984).

There are three important assumptions made while applying CAT. First, the objective features a product will have for the product to be evaluated as creative are not known. If the objective features are already known to us, the product with these features will not be considered as creative since it is not new. Therefore, the expert judges in CAT are not presented with any criteria. Second, creativity is a trait that expert judges can recognize and often agree on without being given any definition or criteria. Third, there are varying degrees of creativity: some are more or less creative than others. 
 

There are several requirements need to be met in applying CAT. First, the judges must be experts in their pertinent domain and have implicit criteria of creativity. Second, the judges must evaluate individually, without any instructions from the researcher. Third, before applying CAT, a preliminary assessment regarding technical goodness and artistic appeal of a product must be conducted to provide useful information. Since CAT determines judges’ subjective opinions, the preliminary assessment can be useful in getting the judges’ objective evaluation. Therefore, it is good practice to conduct both tests and compare the two to see if they are related to or independent from each other.

While several studies by Amabile and others (Amabile & Gitomer, 1984; Hennessey & Amabile, 1988a) have demonstrated that CAT could be used reliably in assessing artistic creativity, that is, the ability to invent new ways of thinking about things, new art forms, new designs, new photos, and new concepts, it has not been used to assess other types of creativity like technological creativity, which is innovation, new products and ideas and technologies or economic creativity, which includes entrepreneurship, turning things into new businesses and new industries.
 

References

Amabile, T. M., & Gitomer, J. (1984). Children's artistic creativity: Effects of choice in task materials. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 10, 209–215.

Franken Robert E.(1994) Human Motivation, 3rd edition.

Hennessey, B. A., & Amabile, T. M. (1988a). Story-telling: A mehtod for assessing children's creativity. Journal of Creative Behavior, 22(4), 235–246.

Hennessey, B. A., & Amabile, T. M. (1988b). The conditions of creativity. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), The nature of creativity: Contemporary psychological perspectives (pp. 11–38). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Simonton, D. K.(2000). Creativity: Cognitive, personal, developmental, and social aspects. American Psychologist, 55, 151-158

Torrance, E. P., & Ball, O. E. (1984). Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking: Streamlined (revised) manual, Figural A and B. Bensenville, IL: Scholastic Testing Services.

 

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