Who is creative? Identifying children's creative abilities

Abstract

Some schools use measures of creative abilities in addition to measures of intellectual and academic abilities to identify children of varied talents. The question remains, to what extent can we identify children with high potential to be creatively productive when they have not yet demonstrated creative talent? Can we have confidence in such decisions? This article compares strengths and weaknesses of methods of assessing creativity and lists more than 60 standardized measures used to assess children's creativity. Procedures for using formal and informal measures in the decision‐making process are also discussed.