Exploring the Domain Specificity of Creativity in Children: The Relationship between a Non-Verbal Creative Production Test and Creative Problem-Solving Activities

In this study, we explored whether creativity was domain specific or domain general. The relationships between students’ scores on three creative problem-solving activities (math, spa-tial artistic, and oral linguistic) in the DIS-COVER assessment (Discovering Intellectual Strengths and Capabilities While Observing Varied Ethnic Responses) and the TCT-DP (Test of Creative Thinking-Drawing Produc-tion), a non-verbal general measure of creativi-ty, were examined. The participants were 135 first and second graders from two schools in the Southwestern United States from linguisti-cally and culturally diverse backgrounds. Pearson correlations, canonical correlations, and multiple regression analyses were calcu-lated to describe the relationship between the TCT-DP and the three DISCOVER creative problem-solving activities. We found that crea-tivity has both domain-specific and domain-general aspects, but that the domain-specific component seemed more prominent. One im-plication of these results is that educators should consider assessing creativity in specific domains to place students in special programs for gifted students rather than relying only on domain-general measures of divergent think-ing or creativity.