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Sternberg Investment Theory (2012)
Sternberg Investment Theory (2012)
In this article, I review ideas about creativity and its assessment. I open with some general remarks on the nature of creativity. Then I present the investment theory of creativity. Then I describe prompts my colleagues and I have used to measure creativity.
Next I describe some of the assessments we have used to measure creativity. The ultimate goal is that assessments such as those described in this article eventually will make
their way into standardized tests of abilities, talents, and skills.
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Intellectual Abilities
Personality
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TABLE 1
Creative Kaleidoscope Prompts: Classes of 20112014
1. Historys great events often turn on small moments. For example, what if Rosa Parks had given up her seat on that bus? What if Pope John
Paul I had not died after a month in ofce in 1978? What if Gore had beaten Bush in Florida and won the 2000 U.S. Presidential election? Using
your knowledge of American or world history, choose a dening moment and imagine an alternate historical scenario if that key event had
played out differently.
2. Create a short story using one of the following topics:
a. The End of MTV
b. Confessions of a Middle School Bully
c. The Professor Disappeared
d. The Mysterious Lab
3. The human narrative is replete with memorable characters like Americas Johnny Appleseed, ancient Greeces Perseus, or the Fox Spirits of
East Asia. Imagine one of humanitys storied gures is alive and working in the world today. Why does Eric the Red have a desk job? Would
Shiva be a general or a diplomat? Is Quetzalcoatl trapped in a zoo? In short, connect your chosen gure to the contemporary world and imagine
the life he=she=it might lead. (Analytical & Creative)
4. Engineers and scientists like astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble discover new solutions to contemporary issues. Equipped with his ve senses,
Hubble said, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science. Using your knowledge of scientic principles, identify
an adventure in science you would like to study and tell us how you would design an investigation to address it. What solution do you hope to
nd and why? (Creative & Wisdom)
5. Create a short story using one of the following topics (Creative):
a) One Way Ticket
b) Do Not Push
c) Gorillas or Guerillas?
d) Toast
e) The Back Seat on the School Bus
6. Use an 8.5 11 inch sheet of paper to create something. You can blueprint your future home, create a new product, design a costume or a
theatrical set, compose a score or do something entirely different. Let your imagination wander. (Creative & Practical)
7. Use one of the following topics to create a short story:
a. The Spam Filter
b. Seventeen Minutes Ago . . .
c. Two By Two
d. Facebook
e. Now Theres the Rub . . .
f. No Whip Half-Caf Latte
g. The Eleventh Commandment
8. Its 1781 and the American colonies were just defeated by the British at Yorktown. Imagine history without the United States as we know it.
9. Are we alone?
10. French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss observed The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers; hes one who asks the right
questions. Using your knowledge of scientic and=or mathematical principles, identify a question whose answer you seek and tell us how you
might go about investigating it.
11. Kermit the Frog famously lamented Its not easy being green. Do you agree?
12. Share a one-minute video that says something about you, upload it to YouTube or another easily accessible Web site, and give us the URL.
What you do or say is totally up to you. (Unfortunately, we are unable to watch videos that come in any form other than a URL link.)
13. Write a short story using one of the following titles:
a) House of Cards
b) The Poor Sport
c) Drama at the Prom
d) Election Night, 2044
e) The Getaway
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TABLE 2
Examples of Two Stories Written in Response to Prompt to Imagine History Had Taken a Different Path
one of the pages, the participant was given 15 min to formulate a short story and dictate it into a cassette recorder.
Six judges were trained to rate the stories. As with the
written stories, each judge rated the stories for originality,
complexity, emotional evocativeness, and descriptiveness
on 5-point scales.
Rasch reliability indexes for the composite person
ability estimates for the Written and Oral Stories were
very good (.79 and .80, respectively). The judges for
both the Written and Oral Stories varied greatly in terms
of their severity of ratings for the stories. For the Written Stories, the judges also ranged in their t to the
model, although the reliability was still sound (rater
reliability .94). For the Oral Stories, all the judges t
the model very well, so their differences could be reliably
modeled (rater reliability .97).
Creativity-based performance tests formed a unique
factor in a factor analysis. Furthermore, the creativity
tests signicantly and substantially increased prediction
of rst-year college grade-point averages for over 700
highly diverse students from 13 colleges and universities
across the United States that varied widely in quality
and geographic location. Prediction was almost
doubled. The tests also substantially decreased ethnicgroup differences. The reason is that different groups
are socialized to be intelligent in different ways. For
example, American Indians performed relatively poorly
in comparison with other ethnic groups on the analytical
measure of the battery but had the highest scores on
oral-story telling.
In a more recent project, Kaleidoscope (Sternberg,
2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2010; Sternberg & Cofn, 2010;
Sternberg et al., 2009), over the last 3 years, we have presented to all of the roughly more than 45,000 undergraduate applicants to Tufts University, application essays
designed to assess creative thinking (among other
things). For example, they might be invited to say what
TABLE 3
Example of Problem From the Aurora Project
Imagine that the world has changed so that almost everything can
speak. Write a little conversation describing what the two things listed
might say to each other if they could talk. Each thing must say at least
one thing. Before you write what they will say, circle who is speaking.
Be creative.
FIGURE 3 From the Aurora Project: A colorful collage used to measure creativity. (Figure is provided in color online.)
EXAMPLES OF ASSESSMENTS
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CONCLUSION
In conclusion, my colleagues and I have used the investment theory of creativity as a leaping-off point for
designing assessments of creativity that vary widely.
The assessments are both verbal and nonverbal, and
are for ages ranging from later elementary school
through adulthood. Our results with these assessments
have been promising. But they are limited. They do
not sample all domains and have been on limited populations. Moreover, we have studied individual creativity
but creativity can function somewhat differently in
groups (Sawyer, 2010). Our hope is that, sooner or later,
assessments such as ours and going beyond ours will
become standard parts of batteries used to assess student skills and talents.
REFERENCES
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