Did you know there’s an evidence-based way to measure creativity?
In the 1950s, a psychologist named Ellis Paul Torrance developed a series of tasks to measure creativity and gave them to 400 Minneapolis children.
Scholars have followed the children since then and recorded all of their creative accomplishments – patents, research papers, art exhibits, business innovations, books, musical scores, and so on. Sure enough, the children who scored high on the tests showed the more creativity as adults as well. If fact, the correlation of test scores to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.
To date, the Torrance test has been taken by millions of people worldwide in 50 languages. But recently, one researcher identified a disappointing trend. Kyung Hee Kim, a professor of Educational Psychology at the College of William and Mary, analyzed nearly Torrance scores of nearly 300,000 children and adults. She found the scores had been steadily rising until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently fallen every year. (Her work was famously documented in an article in Newsweek magazine in 2009.)
When Kim says creativity is declining, she’s not just talking about artistic ability, but a range of skills such as the ability to produce original ideas, see things from a different angle, elaborate upon ideas and synthesize information. (She explained all of the measures to Encyclopedia Brittanica.)
What does this mean? Kim is the first to point out there’s more research needed. But , based on her body of research on creativity, she does suggest some steps that parents and teachers can take to foster creativity among children.
- Take the time to try to find the answer children’s questions and teach how to find their own answers.
- Don’t always emphasize getting the “right” answers, but instead encourage inventiveness.
- Encourage spontaneous and even silly play.
- Foster independence.
- Introduce children to different experiences including different places, cultures, food, languages, and people.
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