The Relationship between Problem-finding and Originality, Craftsmanship and Aesthetic Value of the Written.product in Two Groups of Student Writers

A testing procedure used by J. W. Getzels and M. Csikszentmihalyi (1964) to gauge the relationship between problem finding and creativity in art students was employed in a study designed to determine if the same relationship existed in writers. Subjects were middle school students identified as either creative or noncreative by two separate measures and by their teachers. Eight creative and eight noncreative students identified in this manner were matched according to sex, grade, and IQ. Each student was asked to produce a piece of writing based on 15 objects placed on a table. ____e'Iy-we-re -told to use any or all of the objects and to arrange them as they wished. Two sets of evaluators judged the resulting writing On a variety of criteria, including the number of objects touched, the nature of the arrangement, the exploratory behavior exhibited by the subject, the amount of time spent writing, the total amount of time spent on the task, writing fluency, how the subject had changed the reality of the objects, and how their perspectives had changed. Results indicated that the creative students touched and. manipulated more objects, chose more unusual objects, spent more time prewriting, and seemed to see more relationships between objects as measured by changes in the object reality variable than did noncreative students. These findings suggest that the attempt to understand a deeper structure in the relationship among objects and in how they occur has an effect on the originality of writing. (FL)