Long-Term Effects of Training Procedures on Originality Tests

Abstract

This study was a four-year follow-up of a study by Ridley and Birney (4) in which college freshmen were tested for the effects of training with task-relevant strategies and instructions to be creative on Guilford’s Alternate Uses Test (AUT). Fifty subjects who participated in the first study, now seniors, were retested on the AUT and asked to produce a statement of strategies which they believed facilitate performance. Contrary to hypothesis, trained subjects could not be distinguished by their statements through blind sorting. However, AUT results suggested that the instructional set to be creative was easily restored, producing greater originality in untrained subjects while interacting with training to produce lower originality scores. The need for current rehearsal of strategies and the importance of sensitizing subjects to the role of strategies in unfamiliar tasks were discussed.