The Effects of IQ Level and Sex on Divergent Thinking of Seventh Grade Pupils of Low, Average, and High IQ

HIGH IQ children vary considerably in diverI gent thinking abilities, as assessed by tests of short duration. Getzels and Jackson (3) provide evidence of this. Since they studied only children of relatively high IQ?mean IQ ,132 and range from 108 to 179?they could not estimate reliably the level of divergent thinking abilities in chil dren of low and average IQ. Torrance (7) re ported modest rs, ranging from .02 to .32, between IQ and scores on various creativity tasks. Torrance did not report the range in IQ ; presum ably, it was typical of public school classes. We should expect considerable variability among Ss of high IQ on various tests of creativity or divergent thinking, since, according to Guil ford (4), divergent production abilities are dif ferent from convergent production abilities and there are a large number of each type of abilities. Further, high IQ Ss vary widely in other areas or domains, for example, in interests, in values, and in level of achievement in the different sub ject fields. Should we expect, however, low IQ fifs to perform as well as those of high IQ on diver gent thinking tasks? There appears to be no prac tical or theoretical basis for expecting that low IQ children will perform relatively more effi ciently on divergent thinking tasks than on con vergent thinking tasks, unless the distribution of abilities in the divergent thinking domain is greatly different from that in the convergent thinking domain. The purpose of the present study was to deter mine the effect of IQ upon performance on diver gent thinking tests of seventh-grade pupils of wide variability in IQ, as assessed by a group IQ test. A second purpose was to determine the effect of sex upon performance on divergent thinking tests in the same students. In a previous investi gation, Klausmeier, Harris, and Ethnathios (5) noted a sharp sex difference in eleventh-grade students. | Procedure Subjects