The Stability of “Creative” Manipulation tm.

© 2007

A paper read at: Southeastern Psychological Association, Miami, Florida, April,

1963

By Robert E. Taylor Paul R. Henrickson

University of Georgia Radford College

Most of the attempts to study creativity have focused on the nature of the conceptual
processes involved and postulate inferences about the nature of creative thinking
behavior. Many investigators have commented upon the elusiveness of relevant data
in this area.

Viewing the artist at work suggests another approach to this problem. It is possible
to see the evolution of the creative product and to see just exactly what the artist
does to it. Henrickson devised the “Creativity Design Test” while he was working
with E. Paul Torrance at the University of Minnesota Bureau of Educational
Research. This task is tended to assess non-verbal creative activity.

Henrickson employed it, and other materials in a study of the relationships between
the manipulation of forms, fluency of production, and judgments between high
manipulation scores and aesthetic measures of complexity, cleverness, and aesthetic
appeal in a population of forth, fifth and sixth grade students in Minneapolis.

In the present study we were concerned with the question of how consistently a task
of this nature can be scored. We therefore modified some aspects of the Creativity
Design Test so that it might be easily administered to large groups of relatively
untrained examiners. The materials provided for each subject include scissors, a
booklet with instructions and blank sheets for constructing designs, a standard set
of geometric forms, a small bottle of quick drying glue, and paper toweling. We were
able to administer the test to a group of fifty college students within a single class
period and with working space limited to student armchairs.

Instructions were as follows:

This is a test of the way you create things. Yours scores will be compared to the
scores of persons from other groups. Try to do the very best you can. We have
provided you with certain materials, such as some sheets of blank paper, cut-out
squares, circles, and trips of colored paper, scissors and some glue.

You will have thirty minutes to work the way you want to work. You may do as
many or as few designs as you wish. The only suggestion we will make is that you
use all the pieces of colored paper. You may use them in one design or in many, and
you may do anything you like to them to make the design or picture you want.

When the signal is given, turn back this page and start working.

We attempted to devise a scoring system which minimized the extent which

individual judgments play a part, and which could be somewhat more consistent
than scoring systems requiring highly trained raters, while still capturing some
portion of the interaction which takes place between the creator and his medium.
Torrance and his co-workers have reported high coefficients of interjudge
consistency in many of the tasks employed in his own non-verbal battery for the
study of creativity. However, as Cartledge recently found in an attempt to study
creativeness in first grade children, in the absence of a high degree of training, the
consistently falls off quite drastically. She, or example, had to eject one of the tests
from Torrance’s battery and to eliminate the scoring on three other variables
because she could not get sufficient agreement among the judges.

Our subject sample as comprised of single, white females attending a state-

supported women’s college in southwest Virginia. All subjects were in their late
teens or early twenties and most were from southwestern rural communities. We
used advanced students in psychology as our corers for the actors included. Some of
the scoring criteria are based on Henrickson’s previous work. A few are based
simply on the frequency count of the occurrence of certain changes characteristic of
the designs produced by our subjects. As the system now stands, points are awarded
as follows:

The use of all three colors of paper provided. The overlap of pieces of paper in
putting together the design. The extent of dispersion of the design . The presence of
three-dimensionality in the design constructed, that is, if it actually rises from the
page, and the number of shapes used. These include those provided by the examiner
and additional shapes created by the subjects.

A subject may produce from one to five designs and earn up to a total of six points
per design for a total possible score of 30 on the entire task.

The task was administered to about 125 general psychology students on two
occasions separated by a seven week interval. Scorers were allotted so that four
separate persons scored the two productions of any one subject. Inter-scorer
reliabilities exceeded plus .98 for both administrations, thereby indicating that our
scoring system itself yielded quite high agreement between individuals scoring
independently. While the range in our system allowed for a possible thirty points we
found that on the first administration scores ranged from 0 to14 with a mean of 6.8
an a standard deviation of 2.7 (N=124). On the second administration, scores
ranged from 2 points to 16 points, with a mean of 7.1 and a standard deviation of
2.5 (N=119). Both distributions were slightly skewed. Scores of subjects finishing
early did not differ significantly from those of subjects using the entire 30 minute
period provided.

In 1950, Guilford commented that there are many factors affecting creativity and
that these factors vary greatly from time to time, this affecting ability to perform.
He stated with respect to writers, for instance, that “one may even speak of rhythms
in creativity.” He added that this means that any criteria, an probably any test of
creativity as well, would show considerable error variance due to function
fluctuation. He thought reliabilities of tests of creative thinking abilities and of
creative criteria, therefore, would probably be generally low. While there are
certain obvious difficulties in this area, it seemed to us that if a test were to show
promise for further research, with reliability limiting potential validity, temporal
stability was a desirable attribute. Our test-retest correlation was plus .58 with an N
of 106. Since our coring system lacks perfect precision, we next controlled for inter-
scorer variability and possible scoring errors by discarding the test scores on those
subjects for whom two scorers disagreed on either administration of the test. This
left us with a total of 72 subjects from our class population, and resulted in a
correlation of .73, with standard error of 1.28. While neither of these figures are by
any means what would be considered desirable for reliable indice4s, when one
considers that they were obtained over a span of some seven weeks, an that we must
allow for fluctuations in mood and other factors affecting our subjects, as alluded to
by Guilford, we do not find the results altogether discouraging. In addition we must
point out that we were working with a very homogenous population sample, and the
range of the scores and the range of the scores did not approach what they might be
with out the scoring system. The consequent reduction in range would, of course,
serve to lower the correlation. It was our judgment that the correlations for this
homogeneous population factor would tend to over-correct, and we would prefer tp
report only the lower correlation at this time.

For a few moments I would like to turn your attention to the non-verbal
characteristics of this task because some interesting factors have merged in our
study with it. In Henrickson’s original version, the bottom of each design page
provided a line for a title to be filled in.

I this present case, we obtained titles and attempted to score them separately from
the designs. The titles were not easy to score. We used several systems including
simple word counts, ratings for originality, difficulty o vocabulary in the title, and
whatever other factors previous research suggested. We obtained a number of
correlations of title scores with scores on the designs themselves. Our findings in
this case were quite consistent and regular. All our correlations in this area were
essentially zero. This led us to consider the relationship between non-verbal creative
activity and verbal fluency in the creative function. Other measures were available
on our population, and we explored some relationships here in an attempt to test
these propositions further. I will summarize our findings to date. First, the
correlation between the Creativity Design total score and the Allport-Vernon study
of values aesthetic scale was minus .02. Here we had hoped to replicate some of
McKinnon’s work, but in our group of subjects e could not find one single person
who had as her high point scales both the aesthetic and theoretical scales. We also
administered the Minnesota Personality Test. One of the things we hypothesized was
that the kind of constriction and rigidity supposedly evidenced by high scores on the
economic conservatism scale of the Minnesota Personality Test might have a
negative relationship to creative activity which purportedly requires some
suspension of judgment and flexibility in approach. With an N of 75 , we pound a
correlation of zero up to the fourth digit. Using the Watson-Glazier Critical
Thinking Appraisal, and at this point we were not at all sure what relationship
critical thinking should have to aesthetic creativity, we found a correlation of minus
.17.

Many investigators have reported low positive correlations between intellectual

measures and measures of creativity. We administered the college level Hermon
Nelson Test of Mental Ability. The correlation between total creativity design scores
and total raw scores on the Hermon Nelson was a minus .06. We do presume our
college population to be intellectually more able than the general population.

We are currently attempting to assess means by which we may relate performance

on this task to other factors which are also non-verbal in nature. One possibility is
that creative activity may not generalize greatly from field to field. We know of no
reason to suppose why one creative in art need be a creative writer, a creative
musician, nor, of course, a creative psychologist, and I am beginning to be a little
skeptical of attempts to assess creativity across all these areas. Our interests are
centering around the artistic issue at the moment.

(The talk was followed by slides of the productions of the grade school children and
the college students illustrating the scoring criteria.)

References

Cartledge, Connie J. Training first grade children in creative thinking under

quantitative and qualitative motivation. Unpub. M. S. thesis, Emory University,
1962.

Guilford, J. P. Creativity. Amer. Psychol., 1950, 5, 444-454

Torrance,E. P., et. al. Assessing the creative thinking abilities of children.
Univ.Minn., Bureau of Educ. Res., 1960.

Yamamoto, K. Revise scoring manual for tests of creative thinking. (Forms VA and
NVA0, Univ. Minn., Bureau of Educ. Res., 1962.