Spoken Narrative Assessment: A Supplementary Measure of Children’s Creativity

Abstract

This study developed a spoken narrative (i.e., storytelling) assessment as a supplementary measure of children’s creativity. Both spoken and gestural contents of children’s spoken narratives were coded to assess their verbal and nonverbal creativity. The psychometric properties of the coding system for the spoken narrative assessment were investigated with 30 Cantonese-speaking children aged six to nine. The internal consistency and the intercoder agreement were good. In addition, children’s scores on the 3 coded variables were moderately correlated with their creativity-relevant skills as measured by Alternate Uses Task (Guilford, 1967) and subjective ratings of creativity provided by judges. Children with higher verbal skills, as measured by Similarities (The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children – 4th Edition (Hong Kong); WISC-IV HK), also scored higher in the speech composite of the coding system. The findings showed that the coding system of the spoken narrative assessment is reliable and valid for measuring children’s creativity objectively. An age-related norm will be established in future.

Notes

¹ The criterion of elaboration was not necessarily included because of the difficulty in reaching satisfactory interrater reliability (Cramond, Matthews-Morgan, & Bandalos, 2005).

² The originality of an idea (its statistical frequency within the sample) was not coded because all the creative ideas were identified within the story context. In other words, each child has his or her own story, so the ideas are different. Therefore, it does not make sense to include originality in the coding.