A snapshot of creativity: Evaluating a quick and simple method for assessing divergent thinking

By Paul J Silvia, Christopher L. Martin, Emily C. Nusbaum. 2009

234 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Creativity assessment commonly uses open-ended divergent thinking tasks. The typical methods for scoring these tasks (uniqueness scoring and subjective ratings) are time-intensive, however, so it is impractical for researchers to include divergent thinking as an ancillary construct. The present research evaluated snapshot scoring of divergent thinking tasks, in which the set of responses receives a single holistic rating. We compared snapshot scoring to top-two scoring, a time-intensive, detailed scoring method. A sample of college students (n = 226) completed divergent thinking tasks and measures of personality and art expertise. Top-two scoring had larger effect sizes, but snapshot scoring performed well overall. Snapshot scoring thus appears promising as a quick and simple approach to assessing creativity.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Visual Arts and Performing Arts

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ff0ad0b8139cfc1234968a16669b297539d8ab81

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Visual Arts and Performing Arts

Citations in the corpus

Making creative metaphors: The importance of fluid intelligence for creative thought (2012, background): “, 2008) or the set of ideas (Silvia et al., 2009).”
The cognitive underpinnings of creative thought: A latent variable analysis exploring the roles of intelligence and working memory in three creative thinking processes (2013, methodology): “29), providing evidence for the concurrent validity of Snapshot scores (Silvia et al., 2009).”
Subjective scoring of divergent thinking: Examining the reliability of unusual uses, instances, and consequences tasks. (2011, methodology): “Both scoring methods have fared well in research, but the top-two approach generally has larger effect sizes, probably because it omits the mundane responses that everyone generates ( Silvia et al., 2008 and Silvia et al., 2009b).”
Intelligence and Creativity Are Pretty Similar After All (2015, background): “Subjective ratings have turned out to be unusually useful for divergent thinking tasks (Benedek et al. 2013; Silvia et al. 2008, 2009).”
Ready, Set, Create: What Instructing People to "Be Creative" Reveals About the Meaning and Mechanisms of Divergent Thinking (2014, background): “Only about 6% of the sample majored in what would be considered a “creative” major (e.g., music, theater, dance, visual arts, interior architecture; Silvia & Nusbaum, 2012).”
Verbal fluency and creativity: General and specific contributions of broad retrieval ability (Gr) factors to divergent thinking (2013, methodology): “As in our past research (Nusbaum & Silvia, 2011), we used “snapshot scoring” (Silvia et al., 2009), which involves giving a single holistic score to each person's set of responses (e.g., all the uses for a rope) rather than a score for each individual response.”