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Creativity in Young Children Author(s): William C. Ward Source: Child Development, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Sep., 1968), pp.

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CREATIVITY YOUNG CHILDREN IN


WILLIAM WARD C.
Stanford University

Measures of divergent thinking were administeredto 34 7- and 8-year-old boys in a permissivetesting context and without time limits. Individual differences were reliable across tests and independent of IQ, in contrast to typical findings in studies employing an ability-testing atmosphere. In 87 kindergartenchildren, similar results were obtained for tests with semantic content but not for one whose content was figural. However, there was intertask consistency in test involvement despite this partial inconsistency in response totals, suggesting that a unitary creativity dimension is present in kindergartenchildren but is not measured by the figural test at this age. The response style "reflection-impulsivity" unrelated to creativity, was although hypothesized antecedents of this dimension are identical to those which have been proposed for various creativity subgroups. A measure of artisticpreferencealso failed to relate significantlyto creativityscores.
A major problem for the study of creativity in children is the lack of self-evident criterion against which to validate the measures employed. any Children produce neither the introspections nor the significant contributions to art and science that can be used in identifying the creative adult; ratings by peers or teachers have not proved illuminating (e.g., Piers, Daniels, & Quackenbush, 1960; Taylor, 1959). Investigators have generally met this difficulty by ignoring it: It is simply assumed that individual differences Study 2 is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted to Duke University. I wish to thank Dr. Michael Wallach, who directed the thesis, for his advice and for prepublication access to the Wallach and Kogan manuscript, and Dr. Jerome Kagan and Dr. Eleanor Maccoby for the use of several tests. Scott Miller and Dr. Gerald Bracey assisted in data collection for Study 1. Acknowledgment of wholehearted cooperation is due the Los Altos, California, School District and the personnel associated with its Summer Recreation Program,and to the directors and teachers of the Bragtown, Duke University, Friends, Greystone Baptist, and Mary Cowper kindergartensin Durham, North Carolina.Author's current address: Educational Testing Service, Princeton, New Jersey 08540.

CHILDDEVELOPMENT in creativity exist and that they are appropriatelymeasured by whatever battery of tests has been chosen. Thorndike (1963) and Wallach and Kogan (1965) have argued that it is necessary at least to demonstratethat so-called creativity tests measure something in common and that their shared variance cannot be accounted for by relations to other dimensions. In particular, it must be shown that creativity tests are something other than unusual and relatively unreliable measures of IQ. Their analyses of a number of studies suggests that these minimal conditions for the usefulness of the construct have not often been achieved-either creativity measures have shown little relation to one another, or they have intercorrelatedto about the same degree that they are correlated with IQ scores. Typical of the former finding is the study by Flescher (1963), where the average correlationamong creativity measures was .11; the latter pattern is exemplifiedin work by Getzels and Jackson (1962), where creativity scores correlatedon the average .30 with one another and .27 with IQ. Additional analyses with similar results have been presentedby McNemar (1964) and Ward (1966). Wallach and Kogan (1965) proposed that these negative results may be attributableto the common use of an inappropriatemeasurementcontext. Creativity batteries have been presented as tests of ability, and often short time limits have been imposed. These conditions could inhibit novel and unconstrained thinking by arousing whatever anxieties and expectations have been learned in relation to ability and achievement testing. Moreover,originalresponsesmay not have time to appear;Mednick (1962) has argued that creative individuals differ from noncreative ones, not in their first responses to a problem but in their ability to continue offering possibilitiesafter commonones have been exhausted. To test this interpretation,Wallach and Kogan (1965) measured creativity in an evaluation-freetesting atmosphere,using examinerswho were familiarwith the children and presentingtheir tasks as "games."All testing was done on an individual basis and was open-ended, with the child continuing to offer ideas as long as he could. As in many earlier studies, creativity was operationalized as the ability to produce many, and many unique, ideas appropriateto a simple problem requirement-for example, naming a number of possible uses for a common object. Results obtained under these conditions differed considerably from previous findings. Creativity scores correlatedwith one another on the average about .4 and with IQ and school achievement measures about .1. No systematic difference in correlationswas found for type of score employed (total number of responses or number of unique responses), for task content (figural or verbal), or for the sex of the child. Thus, it appears that creativity can be distinguished from the abilities represented by the IQ score; but situational variables must be considered in addition to the formal requirementsof the task in assessingthis dimension. 738

WILLIAM WARD C. These results were obtained with 10-year-old children. An obvious next question is to ask whether creativity can be isolated by similar procedures in children of younger ages. Several studies with subjects in kindergarten or the early elementary grades have reported significant correlations between creativity and IQ measures when the former are administeredas tests (Bowers, 1960; Iscoe & Pierce-Jones, 1964), as with older children. The two studies reported here examined whether, given a permissive testing context, correlationalresults similar to those with older children would appear. STUDY 1 Study 1 examined creativity in 7- and 8-year-old boys. The creativity procedures were three of those employed by Wallach and Kogan (1965), but had items chosen to be suitable for children as young as kindergarten age. Assurance that these modified procedures are adequate to show the separability of creativity from general intelligence in school age children was necessary for the interpretationof data on kindergartenchildren to be obtained in Study 2. Several additional tests were administeredin an attempt to establish the relation of the creativity dimension to two other dimensions of individual difference.The first of these tests was the Revised Art Scale, which is claimed to relate to artistic creativity (Welsh, 1959). Its parent instrument, the Barron-WelshArt Scale, distinguishes artists from nonartistsand is correlated with rated originality of students within art classes (Barron &Welsh, 1952). The second measure was Kagan's Haptic-Visual Matching Test, one of several criterion tests for the response style which he has labeled "reflection-impulsivity"(Kagan, Rosman, Day, Albert, & Phillips, 1964). In situationswith high response uncertaintyand a number of response alternatives available, some children-"impulsives"-respond quickly, giving inadequate attention to response possibilities and thereby receiving high error scores; while others-"reflectives"-show their more careful decisions in longer latencies and low errorrates. In grade school children, individual differencesin latencies are reliable across tests and stable over time (Kagan et al., 1964), and predict errorsin tests of reading (Kagan, 1965) and of inductive reasoning (Kagan, Pearson, & Welsh, 1966). Several predictions can be made as to relations between reflectionimpulsivity and the creativity dimension. First, the most reflective children should be those who are high on intelligence and low on creativity.Wallach and Kogan (1965) describe these children as showing cognitive cautiousness, with unwillingnessto risk errorby deviating from conventionalmodes of response, a high personal investment in academic achievement, and personal coldness and aloofness.Kagan characterizesthe reflectivechild as con739

CHILDDEVELOPMENT cerned with intellectual mastery, manifesting high task involvement and a strong desire to be right on his first response. Further, he is described as more analytic, more prone to solitary task concentration,and less likely to take physical risks (Kagan et al., 1964). The striking overlap in these descriptionsprovidesa strongbasis for this firsthypothesis. Second, among the more creative individuals will be found those who are most impulsive. Most straightforward would be the prediction that creative individuals are more impulsive than noncreatives, regardless of their standing on intelligence assessment: Creativity might well entail minimal censoring or evaluation of potential responsesbefore they are made public, leading to relativelyquick responding. Alternatively, however, Kagan has suggested that the quick response of the impulsive child may be due to high fear of failure in intellectual tasks; responding quickly allows him to avoid the anxiety which he experiences during the delay needed for evaluating the response possibilities before him (Kagan et al., 1964). Wallach and Kogan (1965) have proposed that children high on creativity and low on intelligence show such anxiety and fear in testing situations; hence, these may be predicted to be highly impulsive. Other children high on creativity-those who are also highly intelligent-are seen as maximally able to become involved in a task rather than worrying over its implicationsfor success or failure. Hence these children should be intermediateon the latency measure, falling between those whose motivational determinants lead, for one group, to maladaptively quick respondingand, for the other, to overcautiousnessand long latencies. A final additional measure was the test of motor inhibition ability devised by Maccoby, Dowley, Hagen, and Degerman (1965), in which the child is timed as he performsa motor act as slowly as he can. It was employed as a partial test of White's (1965) proposal that a general response inhibition ability has developed by around the age of 7. If, in agreement with this proposal, time scores on the motor inhibition task are significantly related to latencies on the test of reflection-impulsivity, importanceof the any relations between impulse control and the creativity dimension will be broadened. Method Subjects.-The Ss were 34 boys attending a summer recreation program. They ranged in age from 7-1 to 8-11, with a mean of 8-2, and in IQ from 97 to 152, with a mean of 115.5. Creativity assessment.-Creativity measures were obtained in an evaluation-free testing context. The E interacted with the children on several days before testing and took them to "play games" only when they were willing. Throughoutthe task liberal praise and encouragementwere given; the child continued offering ideas until he indicated that he had no more, 740

WILLIAM WARD C. and then he received further praise for his performance.A prize was given at the end of each session. Each task was introducedwith a sample item. In the Uses test, for example, the child was told: "Now we have a game called 'What can you use it for?'The first thing we're going to do it with will be a pencil. [The E then handed S a pencil.] Now, I want you to tell me all the things you can think of that you can do with a pencil, or play with it, or make with it. What can you use a pencil for?"' The E praised S's ideas and suggested in addition the use of a pencil to dig in the dirt, as a flagpole, and as the mast for a toy boat. When it was clear that the child understood the task, he was asked in turn to think of uses for a newspaper,a table knife, a cup, and a coat hanger. Administrationof the other creativity instrumentswas similar. In the Patterns test, similar to Wallach and Kogan's Pattern Meanings, the child offered interpretationsof eight abstract figures drawn in red on 4 X 6 white index cards. Three of these patterns are illustrated in Figure 1. In the Instances test, the child named objects falling into common categoriesthings that are round, things that have wheels, and things that are red.

Fic. 1.-Items fromthe Patterns test Procedure Children were tested individually in three sessions. Session 1 was devoted to the Uses and Patterns tests; Session 2 to Instances and then the Block Design and Object Assembly subtests of the WISC. Session 3 consisted of four instruments: Revised Art Scale (RA).-The 30 pictures which artists like significantly more often than do nonartistswere paired with the 30 figures artists like less. They were administeredin a forced-choice format, with instructions: "Point to the one you like better." The measure obtained was the number of "artistic" choices. Haptic-Visual Matching Test (HVM).-The child manipulated a wooden cut-out figure, hidden behind a curtain, as long as he wished, and was then shown five drawings similar to the figure. His task was to point 741

CHILDDEVELOPMENT to the one drawing which corresponded exactly to the figure he had explored. After sample items, there were six geometricalforms and six meaningful forms. Measures obtained were latency to choice of drawing, plus number of errors in choices and time spent in exploring the cut-out form before indicating readiness to identify it. Instructions were identical to those reported by Kagan et al. (1964), except that the child was given only one response choice on each figure and was not told when his choice was wrong. Motor Inhibition Test (MIT).-Materials and instructionswere identical to those employed by Maccoby et al. (1965). The child was requiredto draw a line between two points, using a ruler; to walk a distance of six feet, staying within a narrowpathway; and to cranka toy car up to the rear of a toy tow truck.He practiced each task and was then instructedto repeat it as slowly as possible. Completion times from the "slow"administrations of the three subtests were standardized and summed to provide the measureof motorinhibitionability. Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT).-The final test administered was Form A of the PPVT, a recognition test yielding a verbal IQ (Dunn, 1959). The PPVT and WISC IQ scores were averaged for use in the correlational analysesreportedbelow. Creativityscoring.-Creativity data were preparedfor scoringby printeach response on a separate IBM data-processingcard, along with a ing code identifying it by subject, test, and test item. Repetitions were not included; otherwiseall responseswere printedverbatim. To assure that high creativity scores were not due to frequent bizarre or inappropriateresponses, all cards with responses to a given item which were unique (given to that item by only one child in the sample) were shuffled and presented to two independent judges. The judges were required to sort cards into two groups-those in which they could see the relationship of the response to the task, and those which appeared to them to be inappropriate.Responses which were common to two or more children were assumed to be relevant and were not judged. Where both judges labeled a response "bizarre,"it was discarded. Two scores were then computed for each child for each procedure, following the scoring used by Wallach and Kogan: A fluency score, the total number of (appropriate) responses given; and a uniqueness score, the total number of such responseswhich no other child in the sample gave. Results and Discussion Creativity measurement.-The judges showed highly significantagreement in their scoring of unique responses, with percentage agreement indexes around90 for each of the three creativityprocedures.On the average, 3.9 responses per child for each procedure were discarded as bizarre or 742

WILLIAM WARD C. repetitious, suggesting that violations of task constraintsaccounted for only a small percentageof the child'sresponsetotals. Table 1 presents means and standard deviations for the creativity measures.All three proceduresgave rise to a large number of responsesper child, includinga substantialpercentageof unique responses. Table 2 presents the correlationaldata for creativity and intelligence measures. All correlationsamong the creativity measures were significant. For fluency scores, the average intercorrelation the three procedureswas of .58; for unique responses it was .55 (p < .001 in both cases). Fluency and uniqueness measures were interchangeable, and the test which employed figuralstimuli did not separatefrom the nonfiguralprocedures.After elimination of the three part-whole correlations, the average correlation among all creativity measures was .55 (p < .001). Table 2 also shows a TABLE 1
RESPONSE MEANS AND STANDARD DEVIATIONS FOR CREATIVITY MEASURES

MEASURE

Instances
Uniqueness Study 1.... Study 2: Males... Females. 13.06 (10.52) 4.10 (4.33) 3.57 (6.79) Fluency 49.79 (22.56) 18.83 (12.49) 17.27 (14.03)

Uses
Uniqueness 18.32 (13.13) 6.15 (8.89) 4.26 (3.62) Fluency 36.74 (17.39) 15.24 (10.66) 11.83 (4.62)

Patterns
Uniqueness 28.71 (19.67) 4.78 (3.08) 4.33 (3.72) Fluency 54.12 (23.15) 15.90 (5.12) 15.78 (6.00)

NOTrE.-Standard

deviations appear in parentheses below the corresponding means.

TABLE 2
CREATIVITY INTERCORRELATIONSAND CORRELATIONS WITH UNIQUENESS FLUENCY

IQ, STUDY 1

MEASURE
Instances-uniqueness .. Uses-uniqueness ....... Patterns-uniqueness .... Instances-fluency ...... Uses-fluency .......... Patterns-fluency ........
* < .05. p** < .01. *** p < .001.

Uses
.44**
... .. ..

Patterns
.72*** s .50**
... ... ...

Instances
.92*** .42* .76*** ... ... ...

Uses
.39* .94*** .53** .39*
.. ...

Patterns
.54*** .52** .98*** .80*** .54*** ...

IQ
-. 08 - .11 -. 03 - .07 -.17 -. 11

..

...

743

CHILDDEVELOPMENT clear separationof creativity from IQ: Each creativity measure had a nonsignificant correlationwith the IQ score. The first aim of this study, then, was clearly met: The present adaptation of Wallach and Kogan's creativity battery is able to provide a clear differentiationof creativity from general intelligence in childrenseveralyears youngerthan those they studied. One further measure derived in creativity assessment deserves attention. This concerns the time spent by the child in responding on the creativity tasks. Time was measured from the presentationof each item to the end of the last 10-second period in which the child provided a response for that item and was summed over items within each procerure.Time spent in the task was as reliable across tasks as were the response total scores, yielding an average correlation among the three procedures of .69 (p < .001). Time was highly correlatedwith response totals (average correlation between time and fluency on each test was .81) and independent of IQ (average r = -.06). Interpretationof these results will be deferred to the discussion of Study 2, but it should be noted that individual differences in creativity scores cannot be due merely to differences in time spent responding:Response rates in the creativitytasks, derived by dividing each child's fluency score by his time score, intercorrelatedfrom .50 to .61 and with an average r of .55 (p < .001). Time in task is thus a correlate, not the antecedent,of responsetotals on the creativitytasks. Revised Art Scale.-Number of "artistic" figurespreferredshowed positive but nonsignificant correlations averaging .19 with measures of creativity and a correlationof .27 (N.S.) with IQ. At least for children in the early elementarygrades, this figuralpreference measureis not related to the creativitydimension. Reflection-impulsivity.-Hypotheses concerningthe reflection-impulsivity dimension required simultaneousconsiderationof the child's creativity and IQ. Fluency scores were standardized and summed over the three creativity procedures, and then four subgroups were constituted by independent median splits on this creativity index and on IQ. This procedure assigned eight children each to the "high creative, high intelligence" and "low creative, low intelligence" cells, and nine each to subgroups high on one of these variables and low on the other. Then, 2 x 2 analyses of variance by the method of unweighted means were conducted with scores derived fromHVM as the dependent variables. Table 3 presents mean decision time on HVM for the four creativityintelligence subgroups, with latencies transformedto normalized T scores (mean = 50; SD = 10). Analysis of variance showed no main effect or interaction approachingsignificance. Children high on creativity and low on intelligence had, as predicted, the fastest decision times, but no pairwise comparison in the table reached significance. Additional analyses of variance on time spent exploring the figures in HVM and on error scores yielded only one significant effect-more intelligent children made fewer 744

C. WILLIAM WARD
TABLE 3
HVM DECISION TIMES FOR CREATIVITY BY INTELLIGENCE SUBGROUPS HIGH
INTELLIGENCE

Low
INTELLIGENCE

GROUP

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

High creative........ Low creative........

52.69 50.81

11.65 8.48

45.47 52.05

10.64 9.31

errors on HVM (F = 5.22; df = 1,30; p < .05). It appears, then, that are creativityand reflection-impulsivity unrelateddimensions. Additional analyses.-Decision time on HVM was independent of IQ (r = .03), had a low negative relationto HVM errors (r = -.25), and was strongly related to HVM explorationtime (r = .67; p < .001). This correlational pattern replicates that reported by Kagan et al. (1964), who found that HVM exploration time is as good a predictor of latencies on other tests of reflection-impulsivity is HVM decision time. as Normalized times on the MIT subtests showed an average intercorrelation of .51 (p < .01). When these scores were summed to provide a single index of motor inhibition ability, MIT correlated.34 (p < .05) with IQ. The predicted relation between MIT and reflection-impulsivityreceived tenuous support: MIT and HVM decision time correlated .30, failing to reach significance at the 5 per cent level; however, MIT correlated .36 (p < .05) with explorationtime on HVM, and .44 (p < .01) with the sum of these two latency measures. Reflection-impulsivityand motor inhibition ability appear to be related but not identical dimensions. Ability to inhibit impulsive responding has some generality in elementary school children, as White's (1965) analysis suggests; but "cognitive"and "motor" impulsivityshare only a moderateproportionof their variance. STUDY 2 Study 2 sought support for the creativity-intelligencedistinction in children of kindergartenage. Creativity assessmentwas identical to that in the earlier study, except for slight modificationsintended to avoid any possible anxiety over testing or fatigue due to too-long testing sessions with these younger children. In addition, five tests of reflection-impulsivity were administered after creativity assessment was completed, in order to examine the reliability of this dimension at kindergartenage and to test again for any relations to creativity. The tests and their interrelationshave been presented separately (Ward, 1968), and significant differences for creativity-by-intelligencesubgroups once more failed to emerge; hence, these data are not reportedhere. 745

CHILDDEVELOPMENT Method Subjects.-Children were drawn from four kindergartenclasses. The 41 boys and 46 girls ranged in age from 4-2 to 6-6, with a mean of 5-9, and an IQ from 63 to 128, with a mean of 102.9. Their socioeconomicbackground varied from upper-middle to lower-middle class, with a majority from one school falling into Hollingshead's (1965) Class 1 and those from the remainingschools falling into Class III. Procedure.--With two exceptions, creativity assessment duplicated that of Study 1. First, only one procedurewas administeredin a given testing session. Second, an initial session served solely to introduce the child to the general proceduresused in creativity testing. He was asked to draw a picture, while E recorded responses, administeredpraise and encouragement, and finally dispensed a prize under conditions similar to those that would be employed in creativityassessment. After the warm-up session, creativity proceduresfollowed in the order Patterns, Instances, and Uses. Two final sessions were devoted to Forms A and B, respectively, of the PPVT. Scoring of the creativity tests also duplicated that employed in Study 1, except that three rather than two judges screened all unique responses, and those which two or more judges labeled "bizarre" were discarded. Results and Discussion Interjudge agreement between pairs of judges on the acceptability of unique responses ranged from 73 per cent to 91 per cent for various procedures. On the average, 3.4 responses per procedure were discarded as bizarre or repetitious for each child; this figure is similar to that for 8-yearolds, but represents a larger proportionof total responses for the younger children. Table 1 presents response means and standard deviations for the creativity measures. One-way analysis of variance on the various creativity measures showed no significant differences by sex. Similar analyses also failed to show creativity differencesassociated with age (for children older than 6 years versus those younger), with the school attended, or with socioeconomicstatus. Table 4 presents correlationaldata for creativity and intelligence analyzed separately by sex and employing the average IQ obtained from the two forms of the PPVT.1 For unique responses, the average intercorrelation among the three creativity procedures was .21 for males and .26 for

1Becausedistributions creativityscoreswere positivelyskewed,the corof relational was afterthesescoreswere subjected a log (x + 1) to analysis repeated transformation. significantor systematicdifferences correlations No in resulted fromthis transformation, these data are therefore presented. and not
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CHILDDEVELOPMENT females; for total fluency, the average was .31 for males and .33 for females. Only the last of these correlationsreached significance at the .05 level. Thus, the correlationalpattern found in older children was not replicated with childrenof kindergarten age. It is apparent that the failure of correlationalresults is due to the lack of correlationbetween measures derived from the Patterns test and those derived from other procedures. The eight correlations relating measures derived from Patterns to those from other procedures averaged .07 for males with none significant,while for females they averaged .20 and three were significant.By contrast, the four correlationswithin the Instances and Uses procedures (omitting relations between two measures derived from the same procedure) averaged .63 for males and .49 for females. All four were significantat .001 for males, and for females three of four reached this level of significance. In males, relations of creativity measures to IQ also showed the Patterns test diverging from the remaining procedures. Unique responses on Patterns were significantlyrelated to IQ (r = .41; p < .01), while total fluency on Patterns was nonsignificantly but positively related to IQ (r = .29; p < .07). By contrast, measures derived from the remaining creativityproceduresshowed negative correlationswith IQ, averaging -.34 (p < .05). For females no significant relations with IQ were obtained (average r = .03). It is possible then that the creativitydimensioncan be found in kindergarten children, but that, while Instances and Uses remain appropriateat this age, Patterns is not an appropriatemeasure.Two further analyses were conducted to examinethis possibility. First, it was noted that Ss in this study averaged around 103 in IQ, while those in Study 1 averaged 13 points higher. This difference in IQ might be responsible for a difference in the contribution of creativity to performance on the Patterns test, despite the lack of correlationbetween creativity and IQ. Data were reanalyzedfor subgroupsconstituted by eliminating all childrenwith IQ's less than 100. This restrictionleft 30 boys and 25 girls,with a mean IQ of 111 for each sex. Table 5 summarizes creativity and intelligence correlationsfor these groups and compares their data with those from the unrestrictedsamples. It is apparent that the correlationalpattern for the brighter children in the sample did not differ from that for the group as a whole. Measuresderived from the Instances and Uses procedures remained substantially intercorrelated, while performance on the Patterns test was not significantly related to these measures.It is possible, of course, that a more highly selected group would show a different correlational pattern; extrapolation from mean WISC scores and mean ages presented by Wallach and Kogan, for example, suggests that their Ss had average IQ's close to 120 (Wallach & Kogan, 1965, pp. 26-27, 57). 748

C. WILLIAM WARD
TABLE 5
AVERAGE CORRELATIONS FOR TOTAL SAMPLE AND BRTGHT SUBSAMPLE, STUDY 2 TOTAL SAMPLE BRIGHT SUBSAMPLE

Males Females (N = 41) (N = 46) Creativity correlations: Among all procedures......... Patterns vs. other procedures.. Creativity by intelligence: All procedures...............
Patterns ...................
* < .05. ** p < .001.

Males Females (N = 30) (N = 25) .35 .25


.57**

.26 .07
. 63**

.30* .20
.49**

.35 .23
.61** - .02

Among Instances and Uses ....

-.11
.35*

.03
-.04

-.06
.30

-.09

Instances and Uses............

-.34*

.07

-.25

-.13

in the creativitytasks. Wallach and Kogan have proposed that one aspect of creativity is a high degree of task involvement, with unwillingness to relinquish a problem until all possibilities have been exhausted. It may be that kindergartenchildren will show consistencyin their degree of involvement from one creativity task to another, despite failures of consistency in response production. Such a finding would constitute evidence for the presence of varying degrees of a dispositionrelated to the creativity dimension, supporting the possibility that failures of correlationfor the Patterns test with younger children reflect characteristicsof this task rather than the absence of the dimension. Involvementin the task was inferredfrom the measureof time spent in responding, which was introduced in Study 1. The child with greater involvement should continue attempting to respond for a longer period of time, whether or not he can fill this time with a large number of appropriate

A second analysis was conducted to examine the child's involvement

responses.

Intercorrelations time measures are presented in Table 6. The highof est correlationfor each sex was that between measures from the Instances and Uses procedures, but, contrary to findings with response totals, time
TABLE 6
CORRELATIONS AMONG TIME MEASURES FOR CREATIVITY PROCEDURES, STUDY 2

Procedures Patterns X Instances........... Patterns X Uses................ Instances X Uses...............


* p <.05. ** p <.01. *** p < .001.

Males .44** .36* .86***

Females .51*** .47*** .68**

749

CHILDDEVELOPMENT spent in responding on the Patterns test was significantly correlated with time spent on the remaining creativity procedures. For each sex the mean of intercorrelation time measureswas .55 (p < .01 for males; p < .001 for females). Table 7 provides correlationsbetween time and response totals on the creativity tasks. Time and response totals from the same test were highly correlated.Beyond this, for each sex, time spent in respondingon each task was significantlycorrelatedwith response totals on the Instances and Uses procedures. Of particular importance, time on the Patterns test had an average correlationwith Instances and Uses totals of .39 for males and .31 for females (p < .05 for each). Response totals for the Patternstest, on the other hand, were not significantlyrelated to time from the remaining tests in males (average r = .10); while fluency but not uniqueness totals on Patternswere significantlyrelated to time on Instances and Uses for females (average r = .44, p < .01). Involvement in the creativity tasks is thus highly consistent across all three tasks, and in each sex shows significant correlation with response totals for two of these tasks. These results suggest that a common dimension underliesperformanceon the creativitytasks for kindergartenchildren, although this dimension is not clearly manifested in Patterns response totals.
GENERAL DISCUSSION

A clear creativity-intelligenceseparationappeared in 7- and 8-year-old boys, replicating Wallach and Kogan's (1965) findings with children several years older. Results with kindergarten children, however, were ambiguous. The two creativity procedures whose content Guilford (1956) would label "semantic"showed correlationssimilar to those found in older children: high positive relations among uniqueness and fluency measures, and moderate negative relations with IQ; but they had generally nonsignificant correlationswith measures derived from the test with figural content. For boys, the figural test also showed positive correlationswith IQ, significantfor the measureof unique responses. Age rather than other S characteristicsappeared to be responsiblefor this failure of correlation.The kindergartenchildren were of lower average intelligence than children tested in Study 1 or by Wallach and Kogan, and many of them were of less advantagedsocioeconomicstatus. The latter variable, however, made no significantdifference in creativity scores, and more intelligent subsamples for each sex did not show significantlygreater correlation between Patternsand other creativityproceduresthan did the sample as a whole. It is possible that a unitary creativity dimension cannot be found in children younger than elementary school age. On the other hand, the di750

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CHILDDEVELOPMENT
mension may be present but not indexed by response totals on the Patterns test in children of this age. If the interpretation of abstract figures is a particularly difficult or unfamiliar task for younger children, other processesfor example, IQ-may play a determining role in the number of responses produced, obscuring the contribution that would be made by creativity in school age children. Several results suggest the plausibility of this latter interpretation. First, the similarity of correlational data from Instances and Uses to those obtained with children 2 years older argues that their relevance to cognitive processes does not change during that period. Second, time spent in attempting to respond on the creativity tasks, interpreted as a measure of the child's involvement in these tasks, was highly stable across all creativity procedures and was significantly correlated with response totals from Instances and Uses. In older children, this time measure was also stable across tests and was significantly related to response totals from each test. One major characteristic of the child's performance is thus reliable over both tests and age differences, increasing the probability that the same cognitive processes are operating except in determining Patterns response totals. It is a familiar problem that what is objectively the same test may measure different processes when administered to Ss differing in age or in other characteristics. Study at various ages of the correlations between creativity measures and other dimensions, and of the effects of experimental treatments on more versus less creative individuals, may help to establish whether the same dimension is present in kindergarten as in older children. Only longitudinal study, however, will be able to provide definitive evidence. More positively, it is apparent that even at kindergarten age ideational fluency shows substantial independence from the kind of thinking measured by IQ tests. Zero-order correlations were obtained for girls, while kindergarten boys had several significant negative correlations between IQ and Instances and Uses totals. No explanation is available for the unusual finding of negative relations among measures of cognitive abilities. Nonetheless, these measures, when administered in a permissive and open-ended testing context, are clearly something other than unreliable measures of IQ. No direct test was made of the importance of permissiveness and lack of time limitations, or of the relative contribution made by each to test results. Work in which these variables are manipulated experimentally is called for. Examination of the motivational interpretation of the relation between time and response measures is also needed. In Study 1, the failure of figural preferences on the RA to relate to creativity totals is not surprising, since the former test was designed and standardized for use with adults. The lack of relation between reflectionimpulsivity and various creativity by intelligence subgroups is more serious, since predictions here were based on hypothesized antecedents for the 752

WILLIAM WARD C. two dimensions. Study of these antecedents, rather than speculationsbased on indirectevidence, appearsto be needed.
REFERENCES Barron, F., & Welsh, G. S. Artistic perception as a possible factor in personality style: its measurement by a figure preference test. Journal of Psychology, 1952, 33, 199-203. Bowers, J. Explorations of creative thinking in the early school years. XIV: A preliminaryfactor-analytic study of the creative thinking abilities of children. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, Bureau of Educational Research, 1960. Dunn, L. M. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Nashville, Tenn.: American Guidance Service, Inc., 1959. Flescher, I. Anxiety and achievement of intellectually gifted and creatively gifted children. Journal of Psychology, 1963, 56, 251-268. Getzels, J. W., & Jackson, P. W. Creativity and intelligence: explorations with gifted children. New York: Wiley, 1962. Guilford, J. P. The structureof intellect. Psychological Bulletin, 1956, 53, 267-293. Hollingshead, A. B. Two factor index of social position. New Haven, Conn.: Author, 1965. (Copyright 1957.) Iscoe, I., & Pierce-Jones, J. Divergent thinking, age, and intelligence in white and Negro children. Child Development, 1964, 35, 785-798. Kagan, J. Reflection-impulsivity and reading ability in primary grade children. Child Development, 1965, 36, 609-628. Kagan, J., Pearson, L., & Welch, L. Conceptual impulsivity and inductive reasoning. Child Development, 1966, 37, 583-594. Kagan, J. Rosman, B. L., Day, D., Albert, J., & Phillips, W. Informationprocessing in the child: significance of analytic and reflective attitudes. Psychological Monographs,1964, 78 (1, Whole No. 578). Maccoby, E. E., Dowley, E. M., Hagen, J. W., & Degerman, R. Activity level and intellectual functioning in normal preschool children. Child Development, 1965, 36, 761-770. McNemar, Q. Lost: our intelligence. Why? American Psychologist, 1964, 19, 871-882. Mednick, S. A. The associative basis of the creative process. Psychological Review, 1962, 69, 220-232. Piers, E. V., Daniels, J. M., & Quackenbush, J. F. The identification of creativity in adolescents. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1960, 51, 346-351. Taylor, C. W. (Ed.) The 1959 University of Utah research conference on the identification of creative scientific talent. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1959. Thorndike, R. L. Some methodological issues in the study of creativity. In Proceedings of the 1962 Invitational Conference on Testing Problems. Princeton, N.J.: Educational Testing Service, 1963. Pp. 40-54. Wallach, M. A., & Kogan, N. Modes of thinking in young children: a critical examination of the creativity-intelligence distinction. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965.

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Ward, W. C. Creativity and impulsivity in kindergarten children. (Doctoral dissertation, Duke University.) Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1966. No. 66-13, 692. Ward, W. C. Reflection-impulsivityin kindergartenchildren. Child Development, 1968, 39, 867-874. Welsh, R. S. Preliminary manual: Welsh Figure Preference Test. (Res. ed.) Palo Alto, Calif.: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1959. White, S. H. Evidence for a hierarchical arrangement of learning processes. In L. P. Lipsitt & C. C. Spiker (Eds.), Advances in child development and behavior. Vol. 2. New York: Academic Press, 1965. Pp. 187-220.
[Child Development, 1968, 39, 737-754. 0 Development, Inc.] 1968 by the Society for Research in Child

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