Can We Trust Creativity Tests? A Review of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT)

“Divergent Thinking 5 Assessing Divergent Thinking Divergent thinking is assessed with divergent thinking tasks, in which people generate ideas in response to verbal or figural prompts (Kim, 2006; Michael & Wright, 1989; Wallach & Kogan, 1965).”

“Thus, Kim (2006) questioned the credibility of Originality scores of the 1998 TTCT, because the scores were based on the lists of responses that are statistically common developed by Torrance in 1984, over 14 years earlier.”

“The TTCT is known for having one of the largest norming samples with valuable longitudinal validations (Davis, 1997) and high predictive validity over a very wide age range (Cropley, 2000, for more information, see Kim, 2006).”

“80) that each of them does not provide meaningfully different information (Almeida et al., 2008; Clapham, 1998; Feldhusen & Goh, 1995; Kim, 2006; Mansfield et al., 1978).”

“According to Kim (2006) and other authorities in the field (McIntyre et al.”

“…when using traditional scoring procedures (Nusbaum & Silvia, 2011) and oversimplifying the criteria for creativity to merely generating a large amount of different ideas to unrealistic situations (Barron & Harrington, 1981; Cattell, 1971; Kim, 2005, 2006; Simonton, 2000; Sternberg & Lubart, 1996).”

“For instance, with a sample of North American children, Kim (2006) observed that there are two main factors in the responses to the figural creativity tests, and that there are more differences across grade levels than across gender.”

“…1988; Hocevar, 1979d); other studies have found more than one factor (e.g. Almeida, Prieto, Ferrando, Oliveira, & Ferrándiz, 2008; Clapham, 2004; Kim, 2006b; Kim, Cramond, & Bandalos, 2006; Krumm, Aranguren, Filippetti, & Lemos, 2014; Krumm, Filippetti, Lemos, Koval, & Balabanian, 2016; Krumm,…”

“…how opportunity-related processes were operationalized, ten (38 percent) relied on a count of the number of ideas or opportunities that were recognized, created or otherwise processed by the subjects of the study (a method used in the creativity literature and referred to as “fluency” [Kim 2006]).”

“It measures the degree a title moves beyond concrete labeling of the pictures drawn” (Kim, 2006).”

“…part of it (2) In picture completion the participants use 10 different incomplete figures to construct and name a new object (3) Repeated figures of lines and circles requires the participants to make new objects from 30 circles or lines and add titles to them (Kim, 2006; Torrance & Ball, 1984).”

“Moreover, creativity research has been the subject of scrutiny both from within nd without the field concerning the reliability and validity of our measurements (Kim, 2006).”

“Many studies examined the predictive validity of the TTCT including elementary education majors, seventh-grade students, and economically disadvantaged elementary school Black children, which increased the TTCT’s credibility as a predictor of creative productivity [8].”

“TTCT is the most well-known and widely used test of measuring creativity (Baer, 1993; Kim, 2006a; Ferrando, 2006; Wechsler, 2002).”

“It’s generally acknowledged Torrance’s studies constitute the primary validation data for the Torrance Tests: (a) “Longitudinal studies conducted with the students who had been in two elementary schools and a high school in Minneapolis in the late 1950s form the basis of the predictive validity evidence for the TTCT”…”

“Despite methodological concerns regarding DT tests, including lack of ecological validity (Lubart 2003; Sternberg 2005; see also Kim 2006 ), the most widely used tests tend to be successful in the identification of creative individuals (Plucker 1999), and DT abilities have, therefore, become well established as indica…”

“Torrance’s drive for creating the TTCT was not merely to measure creativity, but rather to be used as tools to better understand what fosters and nurtures creativity (Hebert, Cramond, Spiers-Neumeister, Millar, & Silvian, 2002; Kim, 2006).”

“Kim, K. H. (2006). Can we trust creativity tests? A review of the Torrance Tests”

“On the other hand, some research—both general creativity literature (Kim 2006) and brainstorming-specific literature (Paulus et al. 2011)— proposes to encourage and measure quantity and quality separately.”

“However, after a few revisions, the reliability estimates of the creative index ranged between .89 and .94 (Kim, 2006, p. 6), which is way greater than the desired 0.70 level.”

“Divergent thinking is the ability to produce various possible answers or different solutions to one question and is indexed by fluency, flexibility, and originality (Kharkhurin, 2017; Kim, 2006; Michael & Wright, 1989; Wallach & Kogan, 1965).”

“…(Kelly, 2004).1 While tests of divergent thinking do not necessarily correspond to creative production or creative eminence, these tests, particularly the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, were developed to understand and nurture qualities that help people express their creativity (Kim, 2006).”

“TTCT The Picture Completion Task of the TTCT (Torrance, 1966) is a well-known figural creativity/divergent thinking test (Kim, 2006).”

“, 2014) and flexibility refers to the variety of class solutions (Kim, 2006).”

“However, the TTCT scorers who have been training teachers and students for scoring the TTCT have not seen the evidence that the scores on the TTCT are easily improved with minimal training (Kim, 2006).”

“In this study, the verbal TTCT (TTCT-V) was used to assess individual verbal creativity abilities [Carson et al., 1994; Kim, 2006].”

“Recent research has suggested that the TTCT consists of at least two different factors—innovative and an adaptive orientation (Kim, 2006b).”

“The model broadly defines creativity in terms of Fluency (how many ideas), Flexibility (variety of ideas) and Originality (rarity of ideas), and it appears to be a good measure not only for identifying and educating the gifted but for discovering and encouraging everyday life creativity in the general population (Kim,…”

“Asian culture values conformity and collectivism, whereas American culture values independence and individualism (Kim, 2009). Saeki, Fan, and Van Dusen (2001) reported some cultural differences in Elaboration and Abstractness of Titles of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking with American and Japanese college stude…”

“The results showed a high collinearity between fluency and flexibility in creative thinking, confirming that the two measures do not reflect two independent dimensions (Kim, 2006).”

“Previous research used test-based assessment tools, such as TTCT, to estimate divergent and convergent thinking (Kim, 2006, 2011; Trisnayanti et al., 2019).”

“” (Kim 2006).”

“The TTCT-Figural manual of 1990 gave interrater reliability above .90 (Kim, 2006b).”

“In particular, theory-based creativity tasks do not necessarily capture artistic quality, even though they have been shown to be ecologically valid and statistically linked with artistic creativity (Kim, 2006; Plucker and Makel, 2010).”

“There have been several attempts of modelling DT as a general factor—mostly over fluency and originality—but these analyses have often fallen short of empirical validation (Carroll, 1993; Dumas & Dunbar, 2014; Kim, 2006).”

“This indicates that the TTCT-F is not just divergent thinking or outbox imagination and is a comprehensive measure of creative potential (Kim, 2006a, 2007, 2008a, 2011a, 2011b).”

“The TTCT has two different versions: the TTCT-Verbal and TTCT-Figural (see K. H. Kim, 2006a, for details).”

“The TTCT comes in two parallel forms and is usually scored for fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration of participants ’ responses (see Kim, 2006 for a review of TTCT).”

“This is a relevant tool for measuring employee creativity in the field of management [19,90].”

“…Project (Ligon, 1957, cited in Torrance, 1962) reported complementary findings concerning age-level creativity, and several longitudinal studies designed to help re-norm the TTCT have further underscored its validity and reliability in predicting learners’ creativity (Kim, 2006; Plucker, 1999).”

“In addition, the most widely used tests of creativity – the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking – are actually not tests of creativity but rather tests of divergent thinking (Kim, 2006; Torrance, 1966, 1974, 1998; Torrance & Presbury, 1984).”

“To test our hypothesis, we collected resting-state fMRI (R-fMRI) data from participants in a high-creative group (HCG, n = 22) and a low-creative group (LCG, n = 22), who were selected from 180 healthy volunteers after testing the volunteers using the figural version of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT-Fi…”

“The Figural TTCT is supposed to be less biased than the verbal TTCT test (Kim, 2006), and thus is the focus of this paper.”

“Divergent thinking tasks are therefore considered as a valid measurement for creativity (Kenett et al., 2014; Kim, 2006).”

“Evidence does exist to the contrary; however, as Kim (2006) found, experienced scorers or trainers of the TTCT routinely report that practicing effects are not significant.”

“Of all the tests reviewed here, the TTCT-Figural has been shown to be fair in terms of gender, race, socioeconomic status, and language groups (Cramond, 1993; Kim, 2006a; Torrance, 1977).”

“Considering that the TTCT Figural may be less biased as a divergent thinking test (Kim, 2006b), it makes more sense to use the TTCT with seemingly unused two population groups (i.e., 8th and 11th grades) in the American context, which includes underrepresented groups.”

“Based on confirmatory factor analyses, a group of studies have found two factors, innovative and adaptive (Kim, 2006b; Kim et al., 2006).”

“Fifth, the adoption of the alternative uses task is just one conceptualization of creativity and future tests might adopt alternative assessments like the Torrance tests (Kim, 2006).”

“other creativity measures and indicates an ability to generate ideas, it has therefore been quite commonly used as a single index of creativity (see Feldhusen &Goh, 1995; Hocevar, 1980; Kim, 2006;Milgram&Arad, 1981;Milgram&Milgram, 1976; Runco, 1986).”

“To this end, we used the figural version of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT), a widely used psychometric test for creative behaviors [Kim, 2006], to evaluate visual imagination.”

“However, in Mathisen and Bronnick’s (2009) study, creativity training affected employees and students alike.”

“The TTCT-Verbal has two forms, A and B, and the TTCT-F also has two forms, A and B (Kim, 2006).”

“However, the field of evaluation for computational creativity systems is somewhat split from the field of human creativity evaluations (Guilford, 1967; Mednick & Mednick, 1971;95 Kim, 2006; Duncker, 1945).”

“Its ability to tap into various facets of creative thinking has made TTCT a reliable and respected tool[25].”

“Though other studies have used individual subtests of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking with exercise, reporting them to be effective and reliable measures of creativity (Kim, 2006), this study adapted these measures from 10 to 4 min in order to reduce the chance of fatigue/boredom by the participants.”

“In all cases, the presentation began with a neutral sequence (the noncommercial sequence Color Bars), followed by the example of the TTCT.”

“At first glance, this result might seem inconsistent with Kim (2006b) and Kim et al. (2006), who supported the structure model in which the innovative and the adaptive factors were both loaded by resistance to premature closure (i.e., the third model in this study).”

“Some of the most prevalent scoring measures include the ‘Torrance Test of Creative Thinking’ (TTCT), which comprises figural and verbal testing (Almeida et al. 2008; Kim 2006; Torrance 1966), the ‘Kaufman Domains of Creativity Scale’ (K-Docs), a self-reported domain-oriented instrument, (Kaufman, 2006; Kaufman et al.”

“as management and international business students) scored lower than business majors in the quantitative fields of accounting, finance, economics, and information systems in some categories of creativity. Students in the quantitative business fields appear to be more likely to examine problems from different perspecti…”

“…from psychometric tests for measuring creativity in terms of the impact of the product (Beghetto and Kaufman 2007: 76), like the Torrance Test (Kim 2006; Torrance 1972), and from other methodologies used to assess creativity, on the basis of the properties of the output (Ariza 2009; Boden…”

“The paradigm is based on the Picture Completion Task of the TTCT (Torrance, 116 1966) - a well-known figural creativity/divergent thinking test (Kim, 2006).”

“Kim (2006) investigated the ideas proposed by Tor-rance to evaluate creativity.”