Measuring child-level originality through the strategic use of incubation periods during divergent thinking assessment

Abstract

Divergent thinking, which can be described as the ability to conceive of and express a variety of novel solutions to open-ended problems (Gibson et al., 2009), is one of the most commonly studied constructs related to creative thinking. There is considerable evidence that divergent thinking is predictive of later creative behavior and achievement. However, current methods depend heavily on social comparison as a means for operationalizing children's divergent thinking outcomes, which may diminish the ability to detect key indicators of creative potential, such as child-level originality. The current study introduces a child-level, “personal-originality” approach to scoring children's performance in common divergent thinking tasks. While originality is often assessed in terms of statistical rarity or subjective ratings, personal-originality scoring captures divergent thinking at the child level through the strategic use of incubation periods. That is, children demonstrate personal originality by producing new ideas after time away from the task. The current study explored the effects of a 2 min incubation period on 42 three- to six-year-olds’ divergent thinking performance. Results indicate children do, indeed, produce original ideas after time off-task. Moreover, the personal-originality outcome measure introduced in the present study demonstrated strong evidence of convergent validity.