The Impact of Setting, Time of Day, and Giftedness on Divergent Thinking Test Scores

Students may not express their creativity uniformly, across all settings and under all conditions. Creativity is sensitive to expected evaluations, for example, and likely to vary when the individual is alone, in a small group, or in a large group. Quite a bit of research has demonstrated that certain conditions can be created to support creative thinking by students. The present study focused on two key factors that may impact divergent thinking (DT) performance: classroom setting and time of the day. DT is the capacity to generate ideas along diverse cognitive pathways. It can be contrasted with convergent thinking, where cognitive processes lead to one correct or conventional solution. Divergent thinking, in contrast, often leads to original and unconventional ideas. The sample consisted of 160 female students from Saudi Arabia (80 gifted and 80 nongifted) in grades 10 to 12. Two DT tests were administered: the Alternative Uses Test (AUT) and the Figural Divergent Thinking Test. A repeated measures ANOVA indicated that verbal and figural fluency performance was higher in the art room than in the regular classroom. Moreover, the difference in verbal flexibility performance between the two settings was larger for nongifted students than gifted students. The differences between the settings in figural and verbal originality were not statistically significant, although gifted and nongifted students both performed better in the art room. Another repeated measure ANOVA was performed to test whether or not there was a difference in DT performance related to the time of the school day (first vs. second half). The results showed no differences between DT performance due to the time of the day except for verbal originality in the regular classroom during the second half of the school day. Limitations and future research of the current study are discussed.