The Effectiveness of Creativity Training

In the past two decades the training of has become an increasingly popular educational goal. Techniques for training may be divided into two categories: extended programs administered in a series of lessons and short-term procedures administered in one or two brief lessons. The extended programs are the subject of this review. A superficial examination of the literature evaluating training programs indicates a high level of success. Indeed, some researchers (e.g., Torrance, 1972) have concluded that can be trained. However, this optimistic conclusion is premature, since conceptual and methodological problems pervade most evaluation studies. The chief conceptual problem is an implicit assumption that is synonymous with divergent thinking and can be measured by tests of divergent thinking. Since all creative products are novel, and divergent thinking tests require the production of novel ideas, these creativity tests do have some face validity. But as we have shown elsewhere (Mansfield and Busse, in press), the existing research with adult professionals has failed to produce evidence for the criterion-related validity of most divergent thinking tests. Thus even though a training program may lead to improved performance on divergent thinking tests, it is not at all clear that this improvement will be reflected in real-life creative accomplishments. A number of methodological problems in the evaluation studies also require mention at this point. One major problem lies in differentiating long-term training effects from short-term effects due to changes in motivation and response set. The divergent thinking tests commonly used as criterion measures are probably influenced by factors such as persistence and an understanding of the kinds of answers that receive