The work of E. P. Torrance concerning creative thinking abilities, creative learning and teaching, the creative learning environment, and the measurement of creative thinking is discussed. Torrance began his pioneering research on the nature of creative thinking in 1958 with pilot testing of his first batteries designed to assess creative thinking…

Research on divergent thinking (mental activity directed to open-end problems for which there is no one correct answer) indicates that the characteristics associated with divergency (fluency of thinking, flexibility of thinking, originality, redefinition, and elaborating) are right brain functions. To assess right brain function and verbal…

Tasks graded in terms of fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration of responses were administered to fourth graders in order to identify relationships between these measures of creativity, intelligence, and evaluation skills. With intelligence controlled, the relationship between creative thinking scores and evaluation ability was near…

The author is concerned with the role of preconception in the process of creative thinking, and as a psychologist, he experimented to determine what variables influence creative thinking. In the process of experimentation, however, he began to feel that some specific preconceptions were warping his investigation and were detrimental to a useful…

The research attempted to determine if there are creative processes which are independent of intelligence, as generally measured, and to describe these processes. An original test battery was designed and administered to 102 college music majors. The subjects were separated into the categories of a 2 x 2 x 2 factorial design by high or low…

Recently there has been an increasing interest in the development of children's impressions of stories, partially due to the work of theorists who have proposed formal grammars representing structural characteristics of stories. In order to learn more about children's narrative competence, stories they produced were analyzed in three experiments.…

The history of divergent-thinking tests suggests that new approaches to creativity testing are needed. Research has focused on the relation of creativity to insight, divergent problem solving, problem finding, and intelligence. A proposed situational model of creativity defines creativity as a meaningful response to open-problem, open-solution…

This study compared the creative self-direction, creative behavior, and creative activities of preschool children to determine if students and teachers trained in the creative process and in observation techniques can, with reliability, observe the creative potential of young children. Creative abilities of 155 children from four preschool centers…

Synergistic psychology has been proposed as a meta theory for synthesizing different psychological theories into an explanation of how social, cognitive, and biological factors interact in human behavior. The basic theoretical assumption in synergistic psychology is that internalized social interactions become higher mental functions that regulate…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of verbal experience on children's creative expression and to develop more precise means for interpreting and evaluating children's art. Two questions were of interest: (1) Does the experimental approach described here enable children to resist forces tending to cause stereotyped artistic…

The relation between field independence-dependence and creativity was investigated in 40 fourth graders equally divided by sex. The measures used were the Children's Embedded Figures Test, several verbal and figural subtests from the Torrance Tests of Creativity, and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. No significant Pearson correlations were…

The main emphasis of this investigation was to study the relationship of three cognitive styles (response tempo, response style and response ambiguity) of problem solving. A sample of 288 junior high school students participated in the study to ascertain the degree to which each cognitive style contributes to creative problem solving. The…

The first topic of the conference was creativity. Papers delivered were Knowledge and Creativity by Theodore C. Denise and Hobert W. Burns; Potentiality for Creativity and Its Measurement, by J. P. Guilford; and Some Methodological Issues in the Study of Creativity by Robert L. Thorndike. In the second session, a paper on comparability of scores…

This summarizes a study designed to provide a basis for researchers who study measurable areas of human performance or attempt to conceptualize and develop a theory and structure of abilities. Specifically, this study was directed toward the identification of tests that can serve as markers for well established cognitive factors. (Author/CTM)

Recent theorists have begun to re-conceptualize the construct of "intelligence." This paper reviews recent theories of intelligence and indicates implications for practitioners, educators, and individuals. Theories and theorists discussed include the following: (1) Robert Sternberg has advanced the "triarchic theory" of…