The Reliability and Validity of Selected Tests of Creative Thinking in a Sample of Seventh‐grade West Australian Children

S ummary . Four tests from the Minnesota Tests of Creative Thinking (two verbal and two non‐verbal) were administered to 394 Grade 7A children from 10 metropolitan schools in Perth, Western Australia. All tests were scored for fluency (number of responses) and originality (infrequent responses). Data were also collected relating to five measures of creative performance in real‐life situations, within and outside the classroom. Test‐retest reliability for the tests of creative thinking were consistently higher for non‐verbal than verbal tests, and for fluency than originality. A highly significant relationship was found between scores on the tests of creative thinking and the measures of creative performance. It was not assumed that the performance measures would be related to each other (creativity in one sphere does not imply creativity in another) but a moderate amount of generality was, in fact, found. In most cases the average correlations between measures were between 0·150 and 0·350 (N = 394). The teacher and peer ratings of creativity in school were clearly related, as were the two questionnaires concerned with leisure activities. Imaginative writing was related to both in‐school and out‐of‐school measures. The correlation between the total creative thinking score and IQ on the ACER Intermediate Test D was 0·143 (p<·05). Within the high‐creative thinking group (the top 20 per cent on the tests) differences in performance were not related to intelligence. No sex differences were observed with regard to either test scores or creative performance.