Fostering Creativity in the Sixth Grade and Its Effect on Achievement
THE RELATIONSHIP of measured intelligence to creativity and to school achievement has received some attention in the research literature since 1898 (1). Its importance is hardly a topic of debate. How ever, when it is proposed that classroom teac he rs develop creativity in their pupils in place of the em phasis upon academic achievement, the responses often are: "There is no time to work at developing creativity", "Emphasis upon creativity results in poor academic achievement", or "This is all right for the gifted but the average child needs to have all his attention focused on learning the fundamentals. " The study described herein was an attempt 1) to par tially replicate a previous study inwhichit was found that teachers could teach in s uch a way that children's creative potential was developed (6) and was also designed 2) to examine the effect of the cre ativity emphasis on achievement. Although critics have exposed m any faulty conclu sions regarding the relationship of IQ to creativity due to the restricted range of the intelligence of the samples tested (9, 10), a conservative conclusion af ter examining the research of Getzels and Jackson (2), Wodtke (12), and others (7, 8) is that "creativ ity" tests measure aspects which are different from those usually measured by intelligence tests. That is, although creative aspects show a low positive cor relation with aspects measured by ' ' intelligence " tests, they appear to be different functions of the in tellect. Low positive correlations show their rela tionship but do not indicate that identical aspects are being measured. Furthermore, beyond the 120 IQ level these creative aspects appear to be even less related to IQ measures for many individuals. In light of the slight relationship between meas ured creativity and intelligence for many pupils, the findings of Torrance (11), Getzels and Jackson (2), and Hutchinson (3) would lead one to believe that the fears of teachers are justified. These authors have found that the usual teacher behaviors in structuring the learning situation and the usual subject matter content favor the high IQ child and discriminate against the lower IQ, high creative child. It would appear that teaching to encourage pupil creative de velopment would indeed result in lower achievement since achievement has been shown to be highly cor related with IQ. More specifically, Torrance's find ings indicate that the subject matter itself as well as the achievement test may discriminate against the creative child. His high-creative group did better | on reading and language skills tests than on work ! study and arithmetic which tended to emphasize memorization and recognition (11: 60). Although most of the research has dealt with the high IQ and creative student, there is some evidence to indicate that there is a significant relationshipbe tween creativity and achievement even when the ef j fects of mental age are discounted (11: 63). This study will further examine the relationship of crea tivity development and achievement for a range of IQ levels.