The investment theory of creativity (Sternberg and Lubart 1995) asserts that creative thinkers are like good investors: They buy low and sell high. Creative people generate ideas that are like undervalued stocks (stocks with a low price-to-earning ratio), and both are generally rejected by the public.

IQ was originally computed by taking the ratio of mental age to chronological (physical) age and multiplying by 100. Thus, if a 10-year-old child had a mental age of 12 (that is, performed on the test at the level of an average 12-year-old), the child was assigned an IQ of 12/10 × 100, or 120.

How did Sternberg include the notion of confluence into his theory? He believed that several factors combined to create intelligence. confluence. highly creative individuals rarely have below-average IQs.

According to the investment theory by Sternberg and Lubart (1991), creative people are willing and able to buy low and invest high in the realm of ideas. Creative individuals persist despite adversity and eventually their creative product is realized and recognized.

According to the investment theory, creativity re- quires a confluence of six distinct but interrelated re- sources: intellectual abilities, knowledge, styles of thinking, personality, motivation, and environment.

Torrance, the “Father of Creativity” talked about four elements to creativity: Fluency (# of ideas), Flexibility (variety of ideas), Originality (uniqueness of ideas), and Elaboration (details of ideas).

The most frequently used tests are the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (Torrance 1966, 1990). Creativity/divergent-thinking assessment has become a major category of educational testing, and test scores are used widely to select students for gifted/talented programs.

Creativity testing as it is now done is often based on a defective assumption that different kinds of creativity can be compressed into a single unidimensional scale. There is no reason to believe that the different kinds of creativity represent, simply, different amounts of a single unidimensional construct.

Ellis Paul Torrance

What is the Torrance Test? The TTCT (Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking) assess how creatively a child’s mind works and are often given to children to determine advanced placement or as part of an entrance examination. They are very different from intelligence and reasoning tests your child may have already taken.

If some researchers view creativity entirely as a cognitive process, others see it as a set of personality traits. Within this approach, personality inventories, self-report adjective checklists, biographical surveys, interest and attitude measures, and interviews are all methods used to assess the creative person.

Divergent Thinking Tests. Divergent thinking tests are arguably the most frequently used approach for assessing everyday creativity. These tests ask participants to produce multiple ideas in response to specific stimuli. Stimuli and responses are typically either pictorial or verbal in nature.

Techniques to Stimulate Divergent Thinking

1. Brainstorming. Brainstorming is a technique which involves generating a list of ideas in a creative, unstructured manner.
2. Keeping a Journal. Journals are an effective way to record ideas that one thinks of spontaneously.
3. Freewriting.
4. Mind or Subject Mapping.

Have students first brainstorm individually to stimulate thinking before moving into a group exercise. Provide guidance and motivation for students to initially focus on quantity of ideas over quality. Help students understand that divergence is about creating choices, and convergence is about making choices.

E. Paul Torrance

Creative Process Convergent thinking and divergent thinking are both necessary for creativity but in different relative amounts, depending on the creative domain. Situations do not always require innovatively creative solutions.