Towards Game-Based Assessment of Creative Thinking

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

  • Janet Rafner
  • Wang, Qian
  • Miroslav Gadjacz
  • Thomas Badts
  • Brendan Baker
  • Carsten Bergenholtz
  • Michael Mose Biskjaer
  • Thomas Bui
  • Andrea Carugati
  • Matthieu de Cibeins
  • Lior Noy
  • Seyedahmad Rahimi
  • Kristian Tylén
  • Blanka Zana
  • Roger E. Beaty
  • Sherson, Jacob Friis

For decades, researchers have struggled with measurement problems related to the construct validity of divergent and convergent thinking in creativity assessments. In response, some have called for battery-based approaches. Recently, digital games have emerged as a potential alternative, offering increased scalability and improved ecological validity. This article presents CREA: a new, scalable, game-based assessment suite. CREA includes crea.tiles and crea.blender, non-verbal games featuring both divergent and convergent thinking modes, as well as crea.ideas–the Alternative Uses Task, a standard test of divergent thinking, and crea.logic–a test of abstract reasoning. The novel convergent and divergent thinking game modes are constructed within the same contextual environment and with theoretically motivated differences in game-prompts to understand and generalize from the emerging elicited behaviors. In this study, 408 participants completed the CREA suite and selected validation measures, representing the largest game-based validation study to date. Both convergent and discriminant validity is demonstrated for crea.tiles with respect to standard tests, with correlations ranging from r =.1–.4. Having CREA freely accessible, we aim to broaden the accessibility of creativity assessment to researchers, educators, and the general public and through this scaleup validate the rich creative behavioral patterns observed in this study.

Original languageEnglish
JournalCreativity Research Journal
Volume35
Issue number4
Pages (from-to)763-782
Number of pages20
ISSN1040-0419
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Externally publishedYes

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