Why creativity isn't in IQ tests?

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.‏

http://www.mdpi.com/2079-3200/3/3/59/htm

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.