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ABSTRACT
Identifying creatively gifted students remains a challenging yet important task. Often, teacher rating scales are used to assess students’ creative behaviors; however, the school environment may not always provide opportunities for students to demonstrate creative ability, making it challenging for teachers to observe students’ creative potential. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to (1) explore students’ perceptions of their own creativity, (2) determine the discriminatory validity of the creativity subscale of the Scales for Identifying Gifted Students (SIGS-C), and (3) compare students’ and teachers’ ratings on the SIGS-C. Data were collected from 236 middle and high school students and their teachers in the United States. Significant differences existed between how students perceived their creativity in general and at school (t(217) = 7.946, p < .001), and their SIGS-C scores more closely correlated with their general ratings (r = .64, p < .001) than their school ratings (r = .20, p < .001). SIGS-C items were analyzed using an IRT approach, and two items (breaking gender stereotypes, spending time alone) did not adequately differentiate between levels of creativity on teacher or student rating scales. Finally, teachers’ ratings were minimally but significantly correlated with the students’ ratings (r = .14, p = .046), demonstrating the importance of considering multiple sources of data when identifying creatively gifted students.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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Notes on contributors
Lisa M. Ridgley
Lisa M. Ridgley, PhD is currently a postdoctoral associate at Duke TIP. Her research explores student perceptions of challenge and the impact of task characteristics on self-regulated learning processes.
Lisa DaVia Rubenstein
Lisa DaVia Rubenstein, PhD is an associate professor at Ball State University. She previously served as a classroom teacher and a research assistant at the National Center for the Gifted and Talented at the University of Connecticut. Currently, she directs the undergraduate gifted and talented program at Ball State, and her primary line of research examines the development of creative thinking through curriculum design, assessments, and professional development.
W. Holmes Finch
W. Holmes Finch, PhD teaches statistics and psychometrics in the Educational Psychology Department at Ball State University. His research areas include latent variable modeling, robust multivariate methods, and small sample estimation.