Dr. Ellis Paul Torrance “Father of Creativity”

His Life and Learning Born October 8 th 1915 Born October 8 th 1915 in Milledgeville, Georgia in Milledgeville, Georgia Parents were sharecroppers Parents were sharecroppers Education and Teaching Career Education and Teaching Career

Why Study Creativity?  In 1937 working as a counselor with some “troubled students  He read Margaret Broadley’s Square Peg in Round Holes “wild colts”  Counselor for disabled vets during World War II  Working with US Air Force Survival research program

Lifetime of Research on Creativity  1958 returned to University of Minnesota served as the director of the Bureau of Educational Research  Worked on defining, measuring, and developing creativity  Help from colleagues, students, and research assistants  Began first longitudinal study in elementary and high school students  Began designing creativity test  Met Pansy his future wife 1965 Accepted job offer from University of Georgia –headed home!

The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking Defined creativity as: Creative thinking is the process of sensing difficulties, problems, gaps in information, missing elements, something askew; making guesses and hypotheses about the solution of these deficiencies; evaluating and testing these hypotheses; possibly revising and restating them; and finally communicating the results.

Torrance determined that each activity he would use had to meet the following criteria: It had to (a) be natural, everyday process; (b) suitable for all ages and educational levels, kindergarten through graduate and professional school; (c) easy enough for the young or disabled to make a creative response, yet difficult enough to challenge the most able; (d) unbiased with regard to gender and race, and open-ended to allow for responses from different experiential backgrounds; (e) fun (Torrance, 1966, 1974, 2001a).

2 Parts of the TTCT Verbal component consists of five different types of activities: Ask-and-Guess, Product Improvement, Unusual Uses, Unusual Questions, and Just Suppose. The stimulus for each task consists of a picture to which individuals respond in writing. Figural component consists of three different activities that take 10 minutes each: Picture Construction; Incomplete Figures; and Repeated Figures (Torrance, 1974, 2001a). All of these activities require respondents to draw additions to shapes and incomplete figures to give meaning to the shapes.

Example of Test

Scoring First started off Guilford’s Divergent Thinking Model 1. Fluency 2. Originality 3.Flexibiltiy 4. Elbaoration 3.Flexibiltiy 4. Elbaoration 1984 Eliminated Flexibility and added Resistance to Premature Closure and Abstractness of Titles

Longitudinal  7 Longitudinal studies  Two major portions of the research studies followed a group of high school students with follow up intervals at 7 and 12 years and two elementary schools with follow up intervals at 22 and 4o year intervals  The results of the longitudinal studies provide evidence of the validity of the TTCT, and to a lesser extent, IQ for predicting adult creative achievement. Overall, the correlation coefficients may be considered of moderate magnitude for the social sciences (Cohen, 1988).  Even with the research they understood that there are other factors that can help the creative process or hinder it. Torrance knew that their true value lay in their ability to adequately predict adult creativity

Future Problem Solving Program  Combined Creative Problem Solving Process (A. Osborn and S. Parnes) and futuristic problems with high school students.  Objective being to teach them to think creatively while also thinking about the future.  Program expanded over the United States and over seas as well.

Incubation Model of Teaching The Incubation Model consists of three interactive, yet sequential stages: Heightening Anticipation (stage 1) Deepening Expectations (stage 2) Keeping it going (stage 3) Each stage incorporating a menu of classroom strategies for educators to select from in designing their lesson plans according to the model.

The Torrance Center for Creative Studies Purpose is to research, instruct and serve Home of Dr. Torrance’s papers, Future Problem Solving Program, Summer enrichment for students, Annual E. Paul Torrance Lecture

References   a a   rrance-center rrance-center   /rm02152/rm02152.pdf /rm02152/rm02152.pdf   /more-t /more-t   how-creative-are-you/ how-creative-are-you/