Creative ability over a five-year span

Fifth-grade middle-class children whose levels of associative creativity had been assessed with the Wallach-Kogan tasks were retested on identical and similar tasks five years later in 10th grade. In the smaller of two school systems employed in the research, 10th-grade creativity data were obtained by an individual examiner; in the larger system, group administration was employed. Substantial stability in ideational productivity and uniqueness scores over a fiveyear period was observed for males in the setting of group administration and for females in the context of individual testing. Creativity and IQ, which were unrelated at 5th grade level, remained unrelated for females at 10th grade, but became positively correlated for males. Multiple regression analysis indicated that 5th- and 10th-grade creativity and 5th-grade IQ accounted for approximately half of the variance in extracurricular activities in the smaller school system. Predictability was considerably poorer in the larger school system. A possible interpretation of the differential predictability across school systems is offered in the paper.