Comparison of creative thinking abilities of blind and deaf children.

Abstract

Researchers have compared the creative thinking abilities of blind and seeing children and of deaf and hearing children. Tisdall, Blackhurst, and Marks (1967) found that blind children exhibited more verbal fluency than did seeing children and visual familiarity with the environment allowed seeing children advantage over the blind in a small number of creative thinking activities, but more often than not blind and seeing children did not differ in their scores on measures of creativity. Halpin (1972) reported blind children were more verbally fluent, flexible, and original than seeing children. The deaf children studied by Kaltsounis (1970) scored markedly higher than hearing children on verbal fluency and verbal originality. Performance by deaf was equal to that by hearing children on verbal flexibility. In the present study we compared creative thinking abilities of 34 blind and 34 deaf children matched for sex (male-female) , race (Caucasian-Negro) , and age (9 to 12 yr.). The blind Ss attended residential schools for the blind in Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. Instruction in Braille was essential for their education. The deaf Ss attended North Carolina residential schools for the deaf. Hearing deprivation was substantial enough to prevent them from making satisfactory progress in public schools. The Torrance test, Thinking Creatively With Words (1966), was administered to ali Ss. Since Activities 1, 2, and 3 contain a visual stimulus which the blind could not see, only scores from Activities 4, 5, 6, and 7 were used. These activities were scored for verbal fluency, verbal flexibility, and verbal originality. Resulcs of two-way analyses of variance with type of deprivation and sex as the independent variables indicated that the means on verbal fluency, verbal flexibility, and verbal originality did not differ significantly (p < .05) for the blind and deaf or for the males and females. Blindness and deafness did not differentially affect scores on Torrance's test for children in this study.