A Study on Creative Performance in Italian Children with Learning Disability
Maria Elvira De Caroli (1)
(1)
University of Catania (Italy), Department of Formative Processes, Full Professor of
Developmental and Educational Psychology, [email protected]
Elisabetta Sagone (2)
(2)
University of Catania (Italy), Department of Formative Processes, Ph.D. in Developmental
Psychology, [email protected]
Correspondence address:
Maria Elvira De Caroli, Department of Formative Processes, University of Catania
via Biblioteca, 4, post code 95124 Catania (CT), phone +39 095 2508021, fax 095 2508070
e-mail: [email protected]
Abstract - The relationship between creative performance and learning disability has
been little analyzed and the aim of this study is to compare children with learning disability
and children with typical development, balanced for the same cognitive level (pre-operational,
intermediate, and concrete operational levels). It has been predicted that learning disabled
children would score lower on each factor of creativity than typically developed children at
the same cognitive levels. We have used: a) the Italian version of Test of Divergent Thinking
to explore fluency, flexibility, elaboration, originality, and production of titles; this test is
formed by 12 frames containing incomplete graphic stimuli shown to children who have been
asked to draw a picture; b) Logical Operations Tasks to measure the cognitive levels of
children in areas of seriation, numeration, and classification. The results have partially
supported the initial hypothesis: at the pre-operational and concrete operational cognitive
level, learning disabled children have scored lower on flexibility, originality, elaboration, and
production of titles than children with typical development. These findings could help to
deepen the indications about the planning of creative training in the school context for
disabled children.
Keywords: Learning disability; Creative performance; Cognitive development; Test of
Divergent Thinking
INTRODUCTION
Creativity has been studied according to the factorial perspective useful to analyze the
characteristics of creative individuals (Guilford, 1950; Torrance, 1962; Williams, 1969;
Dudek, Stobel, & Runco, 1993; Stephens, Karnes, & Whorton, 2001). It has been possible to
measure the main factors of creative thinking, that is, fluency, flexibility, originality, and
elaboration. Fluency represents the capacity to generate a large number of ideas and the tasks
to evaluate this factor generally are based on the quantity of produced responses (in verbal or
figural form) by several stimuli, such as the tasks of alternative uses, similarities, word
association, suffixes and prefixes (Guilford & Merrifield, 1960; Wallach & Kogan, 1965). For
example, subjects are asked to indicate the different ways in which it is possible to “use a
brick or a shoe”, to “name all of the things of square or circle form”, to indicate “how a
‘potato’ and ‘carrot’ are alike”, and so on. Flexibility consists of the capacity to change ideas
passing from one category to a different mental set and it is considered antithetical to
“ideational rigidity” and to “functional fixedness”; this factor is measured through tasks of
“ask-and-guess”, “brick uses”, and “product improvement” (Guilford, 1968; Torrance, 1974;
Smith & Blankenship, 1991). Originality is the capacity to produce unusual, unique, and
away from the obvious ideas and to use original strategies in problem solving; the most
important tasks to evaluate this factor consists of “word building and symbol production”,
“mosaic construction”, “inkblot”, “production of rhymes”, “gestalt completion”, “unusual
uses”, “consequences and just suppose test” (McGuire, Hindsman, King, & Jennings, 1961;
Torrance, 1974). Elaboration is identified as the capacity to develop, embellish and enrich
ideas through several details by means of following tasks: “block constructions”, “imaginary
situations”, “planning production”, “incomplete figures and shape test”, “invention of
stories”, “analogies” and so on (Barron, 1958; Guilford, 1967).
The relationship between creativity and other processes, such as intelligence (Barron
& Harrington, 1981; Harris, 2004; Batey & Furnham, 2006), personality traits (McCrae,
1987; King, McKee Walker, & Broyles, 1996; Dollinger, Urban, & James, 2004; ChamorroPremuzic & Reichenbacher, 2008; De Caroli & Sagone, 2009), giftedness (Jackson &
Butterfield, 1986; Runco, Johnson, & Gaynor, 1996), disability (Boucher, 1988; Turner,
1999), and scholastic achievement and performance (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2006), has been
largely studied and debated in different sample, from infancy to adulthood, and this issue
represents one of the most interesting topics of research to this day.
The specific relationship between creativity and disability has been studied from the
1960s to the 1990s. As regards deafness, Horrocks and Pang (1968) found that deaf students
scored approximately the same as hearing students on fluency and originality, but scored
higher on elaboration. Johnson and Khatena (1975) found that deaf children scored
significantly lower than hearing children on verbal form of the Torrance Tests of Creative
Thinking, while Kaltsounis (1970) found that deaf students scored higher than hearing
students on figural fluency and originality (measured by figural form of Torrance Test of
Creative Thinking) but scored significantly lower than hearing students on nonverbal
flexibility. In other studies, Silver (1977) observed that deaf children scored lower than
hearing children on abstract thinking, imaginary play, and verbal originality, but deaf children
performed equally well as hearing children when using nonverbal instruments to assess these
domains. Johnson (1990) found that mentally retarded deaf adolescents differed significantly
from hearing adolescents on the factors of fluency and originality; in fact, the former scored
higher on fluency while the latter scored higher on originality.
With reference to autistic spectrum disorders, Boucher (1988) compared the creative
abilities in word fluency tasks of a group of 7 high-functioning autistic children (ages 11-15)
with ones of a control group of similar age and vocabulary level; they performed equally well
when generating words in response to familiar category cues, but autistic children performed
significantly less well than control ones when generating miscellaneous words. In addition,
Turner (1999) observed that autistic subjects showed lower scores on fluency for both word
fluency (for letters and semantic categories) and ideational fluency tasks (for uses of objects
and interpretations of meaningless line drawings) than control subjects with two different
levels of ability; in contrast, for the design fluency task, qualitative differences in generation
of abstract meaningless designs between autistic subjects and control subjects were found.
Finally, Craig and Baron-Cohen (1999) noted low rates of responding on fluency tasks in a
group of 12-year-olds with Asperger syndrome, as well as in low-functioning 12-year-olds
with autism. Little empirical evidence has been reported by developmental psychologists
today in relation to the learning disability and it represented the aim of the present study.
Hypothesis
The current purpose of this study was to explore the factors of creative thinking in
Italian children with learning disability and to verify the differences in creative performance
between children with typical development and children with learning disability. It was
predicted that children with learning disability would score lower on measures of creative
performance (fluency, flexibility, originality, elaboration, and production of titles) than
children with typical development at the same cognitive level.
METHOD
Participants
One hundred and twenty-two children participated in this investigation and they were
divided into two balanced groups: 56 children with typical development as control group (GrTD: M=6,2, SD=.80; range from 5 years 10 months to 8 years 5 months) and 56 children with
learning disability (Gr-LD: M=6,1, SD=1.5; range from 6 years 1 month to 11 years 2
months). Both the groups were randomly chosen from all classes of primary schools in
Catania1. Each child with learning disability was matched with each typically developed child
in relation to the cognitive level measured with Logical Operations Test elaborated by
Vianello and Marin (1997). These criteria were used to obtain a group of children with
learning disability comparable to children with typical development.
Parental and teacher consent was obtained prior to each child’s participation in this
study.
Materials
Test of Creative Thinking
For the exploration of creative performance, we used the Italian version of the Test of
Creative Thinking produced by Williams (1994). This test is made up of two protocols (type
A and type B), each with 12 frames containing incomplete graphic stimuli shown to children
who were asked to draw a picture. Five scores were utilized as indicators of creative
performance, fluency, flexibility, originality, elaboration, and production of titles. The fluency
score was the total number of significant and meaningful pictures created by participants
(range from 1 to 12 points). The flexibility score was the number of changes of ideas from one
category to a different one (range from 1 to 11 points). The originality score was the total
number of pictures drawn inside or outside each incomplete stimulus placed in the frames
(range from 1 to 36 points); one point was assigned to each picture drawn outside the stimuli,
two points to each picture drawn inside the stimuli, and three points to each picture drawn
both inside and outside the incomplete stimuli. The elaboration score was the number of
asymmetric pictures drawn by participants (range from 1 to 36 points): zero points were
1
The group of children with learning disability were attending Specialized Centres to perform rehabilitative
activities; the most of these children are affected by mild mental retardation.
assigned to the symmetrical pictures, one point to the asymmetric pictures drawn outside the
incomplete stimuli, two points to the asymmetric pictures inside the incomplete stimuli, and
three points to the asymmetric pictures drawn both inside and outside the stimuli. Also, the
score of the production of titles was the sum of points assigned to each title produced by
children. One point was assigned for simple titles, two points for titles with qualifying and
descriptive adjectives, three points for imaginative titles indicating something beyond the
picture drawn by participants (range from 1 to 36 points).
Logical Operations Tasks
We used the Logical Operations Tasks of Vianello and his colleagues (1991) to
measure the cognitive level of each child in the areas of seriation, numeration, and
classification. In each area, six tasks were included with increasing difficulty; for example, in
the area of seriation the first task of simple seriation consisted of ordering sticks of different
size from the shortest to the longest or vice versa. In the area of numeration, the task of
constancy of number consisted of matching each green token to each red token; after carrying
out this matching task, the experimenter arranged each green token in a visible way for the
child and he asked the child to recognize the conservation of number, that is, the equal
number of red tokens. Finally, in the area of classification, one example of tasks proposed to
children consisted of grouping different tokens by size, colour, or form.
Each task was administered to children respecting the order of difficulty of single
tasks and noticing the solution, individually during school time and in a room specifically set
aside for the study.
Data analysis
For the factors of creativity, we computed mean scores obtained by children in each of
five factors of creative thinking. Regarding cognitive level, we analyzed the “concrete
operational tasks” (see Sagone, 2006) in which children needed to have reached typical
cognitive competences of operational thinking in order to pass. In relation to performance, we
allocated children into three cognitive levels employing the following criteria: I) preoperational cognitive level, if children passed fewer than 3 concrete operational tasks; II)
intermediate cognitive level, if children passed from 3 to 5 concrete operational tasks with at
least one for each area (seriation, numeration, and classification); and III) concrete operational
cognitive level, if children passed at least 6 concrete operational tasks balanced in the three
areas.
Statistical analyses of data were carried out by using SPSS Version 15.0 (Statistical
Package for Social Science), with multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), followed by
two-tailed t tests, to investigate the differences between learning disabled (Gr-LD) and
typically developed children (Gr-TD) in the five factors of creativity. The type of group was
considered as independent variable and the scores in the factors of creative performance and
cognitive level as dependent variables.
RESULTS
We predicted that learning disabled children (Gr-LD) would obtain lower scores on
each factor of creativity than children with typical development (Gr-TD) at the same cognitive
level. So, we divided all the children into the three cognitive levels employing the previous
criteria (pre-operational, intermediate, and concrete operational cognitive level).
A 2 (type of group: Gr-LD and Gr-TD) x 3 (cognitive levels: pre-operational,
intermediate, and concrete operational cognitive level) x 5 (factors of creative performance:
fluency, flexibility, originality, elaboration, and production of titles) multivariate analysis of
variance was carried out on the mean scores obtained in creative performances by children
(Table I), revealing interaction effects of type of group and cognitive levels (F(10,206)=2.84,
p=.002) and for type of group (F(5,102)=6.95, p<.001), and cognitive levels separately
(F(10,206)=4.43, p<.001). For interaction effects, statistically significant differences in
elaboration (F(2,111)=5.20, p=.007) and production of titles (F(2,111)=7.90, p=.001) were found,
indicating that learning disabled children at the pre-operational cognitive level scored lower
on the capacity to add new elements and embellish ideas and performed lower on verbal
ability than other children. In particular, statistically significant differences for type of group
were found in all the factors of creativity, except for fluency (Table I); for cognitive levels,
significant differences were noted in all the factors, except for flexibility.
On the basis of the differences among three cognitive levels, t tests gave statistically
significant differences between Gr-LD and Gr-TD in scores of creative performance. At the
pre-operational cognitive level, learning disabled children scored lower on flexibility,
(t(62)=2.51, p=.01) and elaboration (t(62)=3.68, p=.001) than children with typical development
(Table II).
Table I: Factors of creativity – Comparison between Gr-LD and Gr-TD
Factors of
creativity
Type of
Group
Cognitive
N of
F(5,102) for
F(10,206) for
M
SD
levelsa
subjects type of group cognitive levels
I
10.9
1.5
33
II
Gr-TD
11.1
1.1
16
III
12
0.0
7
Fluency
1.23
5.41 (*)
I
10.4
1.4
31
II
Gr-LD
10.9
1.7
16
III
11.8
.44
9
I
7.3
1.5
33
II
Gr-TD
7
2.5
16
III
1.7
7
8.4
Flexibility
7.32 (*)
1.10
I
6.1
2.3
31
II
Gr-LD
2.2
16
6.5
III
0.7
9
6.6
I
14.8
3.8
33
II
Gr-TD
16.9
6.1
16
III
4.9
7
22.3
Originality
6.35 (*)
10.25 (**)
I
13.7
3.9
31
II
Gr-LD
16
4.8
16
III
2.8
9
17
I
3.9
3.0
33
II
Gr-TD
5.2
7.1
16
III
4.2
7
14.1
Elaboration
20.23 (**)
22.82 (**)
I
1.8
1.3
31
II
Gr-LD
4.2
3.3
16
III
4.5
9
5.9
I
12.1
2.2
33
II
Gr-TD
14
5.1
16
III
4.8
7
19.9
Production of
25.15 (**)
15.97 (**)
Titles
I
11.4
2.1
31
II
Gr-LD
12.1
1.9
16
III
1.5
9
12.8
Note: a I corresponds to pre-operational level; II to intermediate level; III to concrete operation level.
* p<.01; ** p<.001
Table II: Pre-operational cognitive level - Differences between Gr-LD and Gr-TD
Factors of creativity
Fluency
Flexibility
Originality
Elaboration
Production of Titles
Gr-LD
Gr-TD
M
SD
M
SD
10.4
6.1
13.7
1.8
11.4
1.4
2.3
3.9
1.3
2.1
10.9
7.3
14.8
3.9
12.1
1.5
1.5
3.8
2.9
2.2
Note: N of participants = 64 (Gr-TD: N=33; Gr-LD: N=31)
There were no significant differences at the intermediate cognitive level between GrLD and Gr-TD. At the concrete operational cognitive level (see Table III), children with
learning disability obtained lower scores on almost all the factors of creative performance
(except for fluency) than children with typical development: for flexibility (t(14)=2.97, p=.01);
for originality (t(14)=2.78, p=.01); for elaboration (t(14)=3.72, p=.002); and, finally, for
production of titles (t(14)=3.76, p=.007).
Table III: Concrete operational cognitive level - Differences between Gr-LD and Gr-TD
Gr-LD
Factors of creativity
Fluency
Flexibility
Originality
Elaboration
Production of Titles
M
11.8
6.6
16.9
5.9
12.8
Gr-TD
SD
.44
.73
2.7
4.5
1.5
M
12
8.4
22.3
14.1
19.9
SD
.00
1.7
4.9
4.2
4.8
Note: N of participants = 16 (Gr-TD: N=9; Gr-LD: N=7)
Discussion
The results showed that learning disabled children and those with typical development
differed significantly in almost all factors of creativity, except for fluency. At the preoperational cognitive level, the two groups differed in the factors of flexibility and
elaboration, in the sense that learning disabled children scored lower than typically developed
ones in the capacity to change ideational categories and to go beyond the frame of reference,
leaving the conceptual boundaries. In addition, at the advanced concrete operational level,
those children scored significantly lower than children with typical development on all factors
of creativity except for fluency. Comparing type of group and cognitive levels, the results of
this study indicated that learning disabled children at the pre-operational level scored lower
on elaboration and production of titles than their peers.
An interesting part of evidence from this investigation is derived from the absence of
differences in the factor of fluency between children with learning disability and their peers
with typical development. This fact indicates an opposite trend to results from previous
studies carried out on sample with sensorial deficit or autistic spectrum disorders (see
Horrocks & Pang, 1968; Johnson, 1990; Turner, 1999; Craig & Baron-Cohen, 1999), and for
this reason, it could be deeply analyzed in other children or with other tasks of verbal and
figural fluency.
The limits of this study are normally attributed to the difficulty in generalizing these
results, but this issue could be solved by replicating the study with a larger sample and with a
battery of measures of creative thinking. However, the advantages of this investigation are
due to the attention to the “quality of thinking”, because we used simple tasks to evaluate
cognitive operations and creative thinking for learning disabled children which explore
different areas of creative performance.
Future research on learning disabled children in educational and developmental
psychology could provide useful indications to carry out long-term training programs of
creative thinking for evaluating the existing competences and strengthening the inadequate
ones.
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