Today in my Art 2 class I used Creative Test #1 from Philip Carter and Ken Russell’s book Psychometric Testing.

On the board I wrote:                        

Creativity- Do you Have it?

·      Creativity Training

·      Certainty Assessment

·      Creative Thinking Strategies

We talked a few minutes and then made connections to the Creativity Takes Time exercise.

The test is fairly simple, make something recognizable from the 12 shapes and then have a peer evaluate and score for creativity.

For a student in a doctoral program, especially one where she just finished a unit on measurement validity, nothing is simple however.

Potential Issues with Validity:

·      Gave the first class the instruction: “don’t draw 2 of the same thing, for example 2 faces”. Oooops, that suggestion tells them ahead of time what the expectations for creativity are.

Shalley found that when participants were instructed to be creative and given productivity goals the creative results were higher. It seems simply being told to be creative results in more creative behavior.

Shalley, C. E. (1991). Effects Of Productivity Goals, Creativity Goals, And Personal Discretion On Individual Creativity.. Journal of Applied Psychology, 76(2), 179-185.

·      ELL, IEP. Hearing impaired, how do students with these types of disabilities or difference skew or not skew results?

·      Noise levels. Class one, super quiet, class two, super noisy. I guess when doing a qualitative study as long as this represents their typical classroom setting the various differences would not effect results since this is the environment they are used to being in. Put them in a computer classroom with headphones, then I could see an issue.

·      Sharing of papers, talking about ideas: collaboration is an essential part of problem-solving but some experts argue that it gets in the way of creative thinking. Steve Wozinak does not believe that anything revolutionary has even been invented by committee.

The amount of time spent on task varied widely, all students were given 30 minutes to complete. This directly speaks to internal motivation, because no rewards of any sort were offered.

Scoring is very subjective in this exercise; I actually am considering having Art 4 kids score them to see of that makes a difference. There were some good discussions during the scoring sessions, but lots of disagreement and difference of opinions.

----This afternoon I had my 4 AP Art kids take the Creative Test and had 5 Art IV students rescore the Art II's test and the AP tests. Initial glance I saw the Art IV's scored much lower than the Art II's as far as what were considered creative answers, and the work of the AP students did not necessarily look more creative. My first thought is  creativity training is essential to an art program, and we don't do enough of it: training, evaluation, assessment, discussion.

I plan on looking at the results a little more thoroughly in the upcoming weeks, but these 3 doctoral classes, and everything else I have on my plate are kicking my butt! Thank goodness Fall Break is next week!