5 Pitfalls to Avoid When Judging Creativity: Assessing creativity with a tool that looks only for divergent thinking
2. Assessing creativity with a tool that looks only for divergent thinking.
Creative thinking makes ample use of divergent thinking, so it makes good sense to consider it when trying to assess creativity. When creativity tests were first devised, test designers were looking for ways to measure the ability to think “far out” as a way to counter the effects of the convergent thinking training we get in school. Fluent divergent thinkers can come up with lots of new ideas. They may not all be good ideas, but they can think up dozens.
When a creativity test asks for as many uses for a paper clip as you can think of, it is calling for divergent thinking. But, for an idea to be truly creative, it must be novel and useful, while attractive enough to encourage adoption. Few pencil and paper tests of creativity actually consider all three dimensions of creative production. A test that merely counts the number of new ideas (as some do) is not a good way of judging real life creativity.