Can we Measure Creativity?
Two Mondays ago we all spent the first half of our class answering numerous psychological tests. Many were interesting to answer, others were predictable, and a few made me question whether these types of tests were replicable and valid. This isn’t a questioning of the tests made by other students particularly, but rather, I am questioning whether specific constructs could be measured by tests.
After taking self-report questionnaire after self-report questionnaire, I was pleasantly surprised when I opened a divergent thinking test that consisted of only one question. It simply asked to think of as many things I could do with a brick in the span of 2 minutes. It seemed like an easy task when I first read the question, but as I was thinking of what to do with this brick I couldn’t help but wonder if the person who made this test would get an accurate representation of how creative I was. There I was, siting in a McGill classroom at 8:30 in the morning trying to think of what a brick could be used for and I couldn’t think of anything. Those two minutes were a bit unsettling, I had always thought of myself as a fairly creative person but maybe that wasn’t the case. After a bit of thinking I came to the conclusion that the environment I was in might have affected my creative abilities; after all, I always did my best thinking in my own room late at night, and this was the complete opposite, I was at school in the earliest class offered.
After reading a few articles on the topic, I learned that the creative process is sparked by a special combination and pattern of regular cognitive elements normally used for non-creative activities. This means that anyone could be creative, it isn’t something only a few individuals possess but rather something that can be practiced and developed. However, there is a debate as to whether there is a general creativity skill to be measured. In other words, if you are creative in writing, it might not necessarily mean that you will also be a creative cook. Therefore, a creative test might come to the conclusion that one of its participants is a creative genius because they came up with an incredible number of things they could do with a brick but this same individual might not be able to think of a single creative story plot for a short story. This could cause a problem in tests that do not try to measure divergent thinking for different domains.
My second concern was that I felt like I could have gotten different responses if I had taken the test in a different environment. Could a creative test be reliable? A study I found used 7 different scoring methods in order to test the reliability of divergent thinking measures. The results showed that the most reliable method of measuring responses was one in which external raters rated the entire ideational pool for each participant. Unfortunately, this is a subjective method which does not make it significantly reliable. Overall, the study did not find reliability in any of the 7 scoring methods they used. The scoring methods could not be reproduced often enough.
If divergent thinking tests were tweaked it might be possible to come up with a valid test, however, I believe it might be hard to produce a reliable test. There seems to be too many elements affecting the reproduction of creative results.
