Kaufman,
J. C. (2015). Why Creativity Isn’t in IQ Tests, Why
it Matters, and Why it Won’t Change Anytime Soon Probably. Journal of Intelligence, 3(3), 59-72.
I was referred to this paper by Kevin
McGrew's blog, IQ's Corner.
I find it an inspiring paper.
James Kaufman is the son of Nadeen and
Alan Kaufman, renowned intelligence scholars and the developers of the KABC test. James Kaufman is an educational psychology
professor, and an intelligence and creativity scholar.
I think this picture attests to the
physical likeness of James Kaufman to his father.
Kaufman asks in this paper, why
intelligence batteries do not include creativity tests.
Divergent
production tests are the
oldest and most commonly used measures of creativity. In these tests the child is asked to supply
as many uses as he can to a specific object, for example a pencil. Another version of divergent production tests
asks the child a question like: what would happen if people were able to fly? The child gives as many possible scenarios to
this situation. The child's answers are
measured in light of three dimentions: fluency (the ability to
produce many ideas), flexibility
(the ability to produce diverse ideas that are different from each other) and originality (the ability to
produce rare and unusual ideas).
Kaufman suggests another measure of
creativity: Consensual Assessment
Technique. In this method, the
child's creative products (for example, an essay he's written or his paintings)
are assessed for creativity by experts in the field (literature, art). Kaufman says that such experts tend to agree
at strikingly high rates.
Kaufman argues that psychologists can also develop skills in assessing
creativity in a child's essay.
Another new technique mentioned by
Kaufman for creativity assessment uses video games like the one developed by Valerie Shute and her
colleagues. The video game they created,
Physics Playground, is meant to teach laws of physics. In the game, the child helps a green ball to reach
a red balloon by drawing objects on the screen.
The drawn objects are animated and interact with other objects on the screen. The game has different levels of difficulty
and playing it well does require creativity.
Shute and her colleagues found, in research with 165 elementary school
children, that after playing for four hours the children's understanding of the
laws being demonstrated advanced significantly.
While the child plays, the researchers are able to examine not only his
rate of learning physics but also his creativity, via measures of the fluency,
flexibility and originality, humor and aesthetics of the solutions the child
draws.
In the CHC model, creativity is part of long term storage and retrieval,
though intuitively it also belongs to fluid ability. Long term storage and retrieval has two intermediate abilities (in between the broad ability and the narrow abilities):
learning efficiency and retrieval fluency.
Retrieval fluency
is the rate at which information stored in long term memory can be
retrieved. The three creativity measures
(fluency, flexibility and originality) are included in retrieval fluency.
In the PASS model, creativity belongs, Kaufman thinks, to
the Planning component. However Kaufman writes that tests measuring
planning do not measure creativity. The
planning component in PASS theory is, as
I understand it, mainly an executive functions element (as well as fluid
ability). Although there is no doubt
that it plays a role in creativity, it seems to me that the simultaneous processing component
can have a no lesser role in the creative process.
Simultaneous processing is the ability to integrate information
from various sources and create a whole or get the whole picture out of
seemingly separated stimuli. Understanding
syntax, for example, is a simultaneous process since it requires integrating
the words to form an idea, and understanding relations between words. I believe creativity is about finding new
relations, creating a new whole out of
familiar parts.
click to enlarge
In
Sternberg's model of successful intelligence, creativity plays a significant role. People with high successful intelligence
adapt, shape and choose environments by balancing the use they make of
analytical, creative and practical abilities.
Sternberg argues that success in life requires people to create ideas
and persuade others of their value.
However, it seems to me that out of the four measures of creativity that
Sternberg developed in his intelligence test, three measure mainly fluid ability. The fourth (writing an essay) can be a good
measure of creativity.
If
creativity has a theoretical place in different models of intelligence, and
there are tests measuring creativity (at least by divergent production), why aren't they included in intelligence tests? Kaufman's
answer is saddening: he thinks the reason such tests are not developed is
reluctance of the test publishers to take risks.
I think there is another possible reason: scoring ambiguity. It's very easy to score fluency, but in order
to score flexibility and originality the psychologist will need scoring guidelines (like the ones we have for
the vocabulary test in the Wechsler batteries).
Preparing such guidelines is laborious, and they never "cover"
all possible answers children give, leaving large room for the psychologist's
judgment. This makes the scoring of
tests with guidelines less precise than scoring tests with unambiguous
answers. This may explain the reluctance
of test publishers to include creativity
tests in intelligence batteries.
I mentioned here only a few of the ideas in this
interesting paper.
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