When you look at the above picture of two open-ended triangles, what do you see? Cat`s ears? Two noses? Two triangles?
Or, if you keep looking, do you see a school of fish? An overhead view of Dolly Parton? Two pine trees?
That is the kind of question you would answer for a creativity test, perhaps the only test on which you score highly not for answers that are correct but for answers that are unique.
”Animals, faces, sailboats are frequent answers,” said John Kauffman of Scholastic Testing Services in Bensenville. ”You score higher for relevant answers with an infrequency of response. Sailboat racing would be an uncommon response.
”Going outside the picture to synthesize and combine also scores highly. Look outside of the picture and see two fisherman catching fish.”
Scholastic Testing is the distributor of the Torrance Test of Creativity, the most widely used creativity test in the world, translated into 34 languages and used in more than 50 countries.
”Dr. Paul Torrance is an avid researcher, a professor emeritus at the University of Georgia, who`s written over 1,500 articles, speeches and books on creativity since he began his creativity work in the late `50s,” Kauffman said. ”He was interested in people who were risk-takers. It`s the people who are boundary-breakers who are creative.”
The test that Torrance developed measures creativity on a scale that includes fluency, originality, titles, elaboration and resistance to closure
(considering many alternatives to a problem before giving up).
This is not a fill-in-the-blanks kind of test, but rather one that measures written responses to pictures such as the open angles, or to questions such as ”What could you do with 500 bars of soap?”
”It isn`t the people who learn everything in the book who advance, but those who know how to apply information beyond the book,” Kauffman said.
”Many creative people in history have been ridiculed, criticized, crucified or stoned because they dared to go beyond the bounds,” Kauffman said.
If you can`t take the test, but wonder what your creativity quotient is, Kauffman offered clues to finding your own creativity level.
”The creative person is the `what-if` person who values questioning,”
he said. ”It`s the person who asks, `How can we do it differently, better, more efficiently?”`
Kauffman outlined six indicators of highly creative individuals: They are original thinkers, can take an object and find many uses for it, can describe their creative thoughts in an elaborate way, can give a creative title to a creative thought or object they develop, are good at punning, and have resistance to closure.
