Creativity

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I came across an interesting question on my inbox this morning. It read "I use Torrance Test of Creative Thinking Figural for autism. How many people should I use at least?" on a research oriented Q/A. The question doesn't mean anything to me except the word Autism stood out, so I dug a little deeper.

The first thing I came across was TTCT (Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking) which is an acronyms. I hate acronyms so I dug a little deeper.

Many school districts include some kind of creativity testing as part of their assessment of gifted children. One of the most common tests used to assess creativity in a child or an adult is the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. The TTCT test is a series of figural exercises (thinking with pictures) and verbal activities (thinking with words) that students do to showcase their creative abilities. The full test is a series of individual exercises that are administered by a psychologist over a 90-minute period. While it isn’t the perfect creativity test, it has proved to be highly reliable over the years as a predictor of successful, creative individuals of all ages.

The TTCT (Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking) assess how creatively a child’s mind works and are often given to children in order to determine advanced placement or as part of an entrance examination. They are very different from the intelligence and reasoning tests your child may already have taken. Instead of traditionally taught subjects such as reading or math, these tests assess creativity. Children are scored on a number of aspects, including creative titles for pictures, expressions, imagery and humor.

The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) is designed to identify and evaluate creative potential using two parts – a Verbal test and a Figural test.

The Verbal test contains seven subtests – Asking, Guessing Causes, Guessing Consequences, Product Improvement, Unusual Uses, Unusual Questions, and Just Suppose. Subtests are scored on the basis of fluency, flexibility, and originality (with a score on elaboration as optional), and these scores are accumulated across all subtests. The totals may be converted to standard T scores if normative reference is desired.

The Figural test has three subsets – Picture Construction (from a marked cue), Picture Completion (again with cues), and Parallel Lines. The first of these subtests is scored on originality and elaboration while the remainder are scored on fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. Totals are then accumulated across subtests to provide overall scores for Figural fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. These scores, as in the Verbal test, can be converted to a standard T score.

Source: Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT)

So this spawns the following question.

How many Aspies or those on the spectrum (adults or children) took this tests? I never took this test and never even heard of it before. My natural curiosity wants to know more!

I do not think this test was ever used with my child in connection with ASD.

He is very creative.

I have no idea what test my kids took for entrance into the GATE (gifted and talented) program, but your description makes me wonder if it is often used for that.

It sounds like an interesting type of test. I wonder how widespread this type of test was?