Indirect Effects of Fluid Intelligence on Creative Aptitude Through Openness to Experience

Development and Validation of Computational Thinking Assessment of Chinese Elementary School Students

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have brought attention to computational thinking (CT) in school education worldwide. However, little is known about the development of the literacy of CT in children, mainly because of the lack of proper psychometric assessments. We developed the first psychometrically validated assessment on the literacy of CT of children in Chinese elementary schools, coined as the Computational Thinking Assessment for Chinese Elementary Students (CTA-CES). Items were constructed to reflect key aspects of CT such as abstraction, algorithm thinking, decomposition, evaluation, and pattern recognition. To examine the test reliability and validity, we recruited two samples of 280 third- to sixth-grade students in total. Cronbach’s alpha provided evidence for the reliability of the test scores, item response theory analyses demonstrated psychometric appropriateness, whereas construct validity was verified by convergent validity, and criterion-related validity was confirmed by correlations between the CTA-CES and measures related to CT, namely reasoning, spatial ability, and verbal ability. In addition, an fMRI study further demonstrated similar neural activation patterns when students conducted the CTA-CES and programming tasks. Taken together, the CTA-CES is the first reliable and valid instrument for measuring the literacy of CT for Chinese children, and may be applicable to children worldwide.

Relationship between creativity and intelligence in regular students and giftedness students

Abstract The present study sought to identify the relationship between creativity and intelligence in gifted students. The sample consisted of 966 participants, aged between 7 and 17 years, classified as regular students (n=867) and criterion group (n=99), subdivided according to the area of prominence: academic (n=66), creative/artistic (n=33). The Giftedness Assessment Battery was applied to assess reasoning (verbal, logical, numerical, and abstract) and creativity (verbal and figural). The results indicated that, in the control group, the relationship between the total score for intelligence and the two types of creativity were significant and positive, and scores were higher for verbal creativity. Only the correlation between the total scores for intelligence and verbal creativity was positive and significant in the criterion group. Differences in the relationship between constructs were also found according to the identification of giftedness (academic and creative).