What are some well known and widely used verbal fluency tests?
Task details: I am trying to discriminate in a language creativity task between
- performance that is due to creativity and
- performance that is due to proficiency in using language and verbal fluency.
The most commonly used verbal fluency task is probably the FAS/Categories test.
First, the person is instructed to say as many words as possible that begin with the letter F. This is timed; they are stopped at 60 seconds. Then the same is done, only with the letter A. Next, it's the letter S.
Finally, the person is instructed to name as many animals as they can. Once again, 60 seconds is allowed.
The person administering the test writes down all the words and times it very strictly. There also are written versions of similar tasks.
On a conceptual level: please remember that fluency is often considered to be one aspect of creativity. That is, the more ideas a person generates, the more likely it is that some of the ideas will be unusual ones - and maybe useful as well. For example, the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (Verbal form) include fluency as one of the three main scores for each task (the other scores are for originality and flexibility). And in a different line of research, Dean Simonton has demonstrated that there is a strong relationship between the productivity of a scientist or artist (i.e., how many works they produce) and the number of truly creative works. So in a way, you aren't contrasting two independent abilities. Rather, you're proposing to try to tease out how much of the variance in creativity in due to fluency.
Dear Ana-Maria Olteteanu,
Generally speaking, verbal fluency tests are psychological instruments in which the targeted students are asked to say as many words as possible about a specific category such as fruits in a short period of time. The assessment criteria you have selected; namely language proficiency vs. creativity draw on different methods of testing.While the former involves a norm-referenced testing, the latter relies on a criterion-referenced assessment. In point of fact, after years of utilizing language proficiency tests, the general attitude towards this type of assessment appears to be shifting. Instead of detailed component specifications underlying a given construct, the emphasis is now on measurable performance characteristics. Therefore, your integrating both methods certainly enhances the validity of the reported outcomes because through determining the speed or effectiveness of participants' response time or counting the number of tokens they have produced, you can fathom out the learners' creativity. Speed of performance and thoughtful handling of language tasks are considered essential skills that are often difficult to assess on paper-and pencil tests like language proficiency tests. On this basis, to sing with the bandwagon, new assessment techniques will be needed to rely more heavily on performance measures, tasks requiring students to use critical thinking strategies to craft their own responses rather than merely selecting the correct options from among multiple-choice answers. As a consequence , by measuring the participants' creativity, we can tap into their thinking skills.For more information on measuring creativity, I refer you to the following link, which can hopefully shed light on what you are looking for.
Best regards,
R. Biria
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED505548.pdf
Some tasks are related to semantic categories (i.e., name as many animals as possible in 60 seconds, name as many animals, fruits, and vegetables as possible with 60 seconds given for each). I have also seen a task of naming animals, foods, and clothing. Another type of task is phonemic and involves naming as many words as begin with a specific letter. As Stephen said above, FAS is a popular task for this. The Controlled Oral Word Association Test is also used and involves the letters C, F, and L. A task that uses dots in which the person is to connect them in as many different ways as possible is the Ruff Figural Fluency Test.
Perhaps you are aware of this article?
Silvia, P. J., Beaty, R. E., & Nusbaum, E. C. (2013). Verbal fluency and creativity: General and specific contributions of broad retrieval ability (Gr) factors to divergent thinking. Intelligence, 41(5), 328-340.
They use a variety of verbal fluency tasks and provide interesting conceptual grounds on the relationship between verbal fluency and DT as a measure of creative thinking.
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