The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, formerly the Minnesota Tests of Creative Thinking, is a test of creativity built on J. P. Guilford's work and created by Ellis Paul Torrance, the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking originally involved simple tests of divergent thinking and other problem-solving skills, which were scored on four scales:

History

In 1976, Arasteh and Arasteh wrote that the most systematic assessment of creativity in elementary school children has been conducted by Torrance and his associates (1960a, 1960b, 1960c, 1961, 1962, 1962a, 1963a, and 1964) with the Minnesota Tests of Creative Thinking, which was later renamed the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, with several thousands of schoolchildren. The Minnesota group, in contrast to Guilford, has devised scoring tasks involving both verbal and non-verbal aspects and relying on senses other than vision. They also differ from the battery developed by Wallach and Kogan (1965), which contains measures representing "creative tendencies" that are similar in nature. Several longitudinal studies have been conducted to follow up on the elementary school-aged students who were first administered the Torrance Tests in 1958 in Minnesota. There was a 22-year follow-up, a 40-year follow-up, and a 50-year follow-up. Torrance (1962) grouped the different subtests of the Minnesota Tests of Creative Thinking into three categories: The third edition of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking in 1984 removed the "flexibility" scale from the figural test but added "resistance to premature closure" (based on Gestalt psychology) and "abstractness of titles" as two new criterion-referenced scores on the figural. Torrance called the new scoring procedure Streamlined Scoring. With the five norm-referenced measures that he had (fluency, originality, abstractness of titles, elaboration, and resistance to premature closure), he added 13 criterion-referenced measures that include: emotional expressiveness, story-telling articulateness, movement or actions, expressiveness of titles, syntheses of incomplete figures, synthesis of lines and of circles, unusual visualization, extending or breaking boundaries, humor, richness of imagery, colourfulness of imagery, and fantasy.

Tasks

A brief description of the tasks used by Torrance is given below:

Verbal tasks using verbal stimuli

Verbal tasks using nonverbal stimuli

Non-verbal tasks (figural)