Abstract In the continued effort to identify creative talent, divergent thinking (DT) assessments are commonly employed to objectively assess aspects of individual creative ability. Despite their common usage, the selection of DT prompts remains unstandardized. This is concerning because it is unclear if all prompts can be employed equally or if certain characteristics associated with the acquisition and usage of said prompt in a given language affect the magnitude of response originality. Researchers administered a computer-based DT assessment to 386 elementary students and compared the originality scores of the respondents to the originality scores predicted by prompts’ psycholinguistic features. Hierarchical linear modeling was employed to control individual DT ability and examine the effects of psycholinguistics on originality at two levels, with individual response originality scores (level 1) nested within individual respondents (level 2). Results indicated statistically significant main effects for word frequency, semantic diversity, prompt type, and item reaction time. There were also several significant interaction effects between prompt type and word frequency, prompt type and word length, and prompt type and semantic diversity. The resulting final model explained approximately 18% of the variance in originality scores, suggesting the need for further consideration of DT prompt choice.
Vlaamster et al. (Thu,) studied this question.