A Systematic Quantitative Review of Divergent Thinking Assessments

• DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/eaqbt
• Publication Date: 2023-11-08T05:00:58Z
• Authors: Janika Saretzki; Boris Forthmann; Mathias Benedek
• Keywords: Psychology; Social and Behavioral Sciences

Divergent thinking (DT) tasks are among the most established approaches to assess creative potential. Although DT assessments widely used, there exist many variants on how can be administered and scored. We present findings from a preregistered, systematic review of assessment methods aiming determine prevalence various conditions as well identify recent trends in field. searched two electronic databases for studies that have investigated creativity with DT. then screened total 2066 publications published between 1957 2022 identified 451 eligible within 396 articles. The employed data coding system discerned more than 110 options establish specific administration scoring tasks. Amongst others, we found Alternate Uses Task is used task, task time commonly set three minutes, responses often scored by human raters. While traditional instructions emphasized idea fluency, encourage originality. Trends include response quality (i.e., originality/creativity) aggregation account confounding effect fluency (e.g., average or subset such top- max-scoring) generally an increasing instruction-scoring-fit. Overall, numerous lacked information regarding precise procedures both scoring. In sum, identifies practices but also highlights substantial heterogeneity underreporting poses risk reproducibility research.