Are we there yet? A Review of Creativity Methodologies

Creativity - A Force to Innovation, 2021

The history of creativity assessment is as old as the concept itself. Researchers from various cultures and disciplines attempted to define the concept of creativity and offer a valid way to assess it. Creativity is generally defined as the ability to produce work that is novel and appropriate. Researchers in the field attempted to measure creativity from different perspectives and tried to answer the question like “What are the mental processes involved in creative thought?, Which personality traits are associated with creativity?, How can a product can be judged to be creative? and, What are the external forces that affect creativity?”. The answers of these questions constitute the most commonly used creativity assessment instruments. This chapter presents a brief overview on assessment of creativity through the eyes of the psychometric perspective and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of various instruments used in the field.

Creativity Research Journal, 2012

The scientific study of creativity has proven a difficult undertaking. Researchers have employed a diversity of definitions and measurement methods. As a result, creativity research is underrepresented in the literature and the findings of different studies often prove difficult to draw into a coherent body of understanding. A heuristic framework to explicate the different methods by which creativity may be studied forms the basis of this article. Drawing upon existing conceptions of the creativity construct and previous efforts to provide structure to creativity research, the new taxonomic framework examines creativity from 3 primary perspectives in the form of a 3-dimensional matrix. The implications of the taxonomic framework for creativity research are examined. The new taxonomic framework contributes to the understanding of creativity research through the introduction of a comprehensive heuristic to guide future research and the interpretation of previous studies.

International Journal of Quality Assurance in Engineering and Technology Education, 2014

The most widely used creativity assessments are divergent thinking tests, but these and other popular creativity measures have been shown to have little validity. The Consensual Assessment Technique is a powerful tool used by creativity researchers in which panels of expert judges are asked to rate the creativity of creative products such as stories, collages, poems, and other artifacts. The Consensual Assessment Technique is based on the idea that the best measure of the creativity of a work of art, a theory, a research proposal, or any other artifact is the combined assessment of experts in that field. Unlike other measures of creativity, the Consensual Assessment Technique is not based on any particular theory of creativity, which means that its validity (which has been well established empirically) is not dependent upon the validity of any particular theory of creativity. The Consensual Assessment Technique has been deemed the “gold standard” in creativity research and can be ve...

Handbook of Research on Creativity, 2013

Unpacking Creativity: Culture, Innovation, and Motivation in Global Contexts, 2023

The field of creativity research, in its modern sense, has existed for some 70 years. Initially driven by questions anchored in education, creativity research has branched out over the last 70 years to touch on many areas of human activity. However, it can be argued that the discipline has, in those 70 years, failed to make a deep and lasting impact in areas such as education. Despite strong interest in creativity, many countries still struggle with the issue of how to develop and assess creativity across the range of disciplines. A key cause of this gap between research and practical application, especially in education, but also in business, may be a problem of measurement. In particular, the issue is a matter of the fitness-forpurpose of creativity measurement. This can be understood in terms of five key factors: (a) domainspecificity; (b) consistency and trustworthiness; (c) classroom integration; (d) speed of results, and (e) cost.

1995

Developments in the measurement and theory of creativity are reviewed, and the present status of creativity vis-a-vis psychometrics and theory is explored. The realm of creativity has been a gliagmire of definition problems, with creativity variously defined in terms of process or stages. In past eras, creativity was essentially measured by output or productivity. Contemporay measures include the Torrance tests, derived from the structure of intellect model, and various tests such as the Remote Associates Test (Mednick, 1962), the Starkweather Originality Test (1974), the Group Inventory for Finding Creative Talent (1980), the Barron Welsh Art Scale, and a number of rating scales and surveys. The proliferation of tests suggests that it is necessary to review' the components of a test before issuing it, looking for an operational definition of creativity and support for test reliability and validity. Minimum requirements include: (1) outside empirical support for the test; (2) long-term follow-up studies; (3) comparison measures against other recognized measures; (4) essential basic agreement in the field as to what "creativity" means; and (5) an adequate theoretical base for research and test construction. (Contains 36 references.) (SLD)

This introduction is an attempt to prepare our readers for an exceptional journey into the fascinating landscape of research methods used to study the remarkable phenomenon of creativity. Building on what is already available about research methods on creativity, we explain what we were trying to achieve, how we went about it, and why we are proud of what we have achieved-primarily through the work of our contributors to this handbook. Most of this introduction is dedicated to brief descriptions of the chapters of the book. At the end, we make some suggestions for using this edited volume. Creativity research has significantly matured in recent years, resulting in a wide variety of models and views of creativity (see Runco, 2019 for a recent comprehensive overview). Scholarly interest in creativity has gone mainstream, and dedicated creativity journals such as Journal of

Handbook of Research Methods on Creativity, 2020

The Journal of Creative Behavior, 1972

Although the volume of literature on creativity has increased very rapidly since the early 1950's, there are many difficult problems which have not been solved. Central among these difficulties-perhaps because of its pervasiveness-is the issue of assessing creativity. How can we recognize creativity? Can we identify creative behavior and creative potential with confidence and accuracy? By what standards will individual or group differences be described, or the effects of training programs be documented? These are practical questions which, in their simplest form, say, "How can creativity be assessed?" The purposes of this paper are, therefore, to review briefly and selectively some major issues concerning the assessment of creativity, to identify theoretical and methodological issues in the study of creativity, and to examine the areas in which research is needed. In dealing with problems of psychological measurement or assessment, three general categories may be employed: validity, reliability, and usability. This paper has been divided into three major sections, corresponding to these categories i within each, major problems and research needs will be identified. VALIDITY Among our several concerns in assessing creativity, perhaps none is more important or more complex than validity. The question of whether or not some measure of creativity "really" It Many of the ideas in this article are presented in greater detaU in a report of the Creativity Task Force (E. Paul Torrance, Chairman) of a project on the Critical Appraisal of Research in the Personality-Emotions-Motit1ation Domain, directed by S. B. Sells and supported by the U. S. Office of Education.