With the particular technological challenges facing our twenty-first-century society, it is crucial that design engineers continue to foster the innovative potential of students, as well as identify the underlying cognitive abilities which support the innovative process. In this investigation, we examine the predictive link from an individual's analogical and relational reasoning ability to their success using the TRIZ (from the Russian acronym for 'Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadatch' meaning theory of inventive problem-solving) ideation method. TRIZ instruction was shown to significantly increase the novelty of participant's generated solutions to an engineering design problem. Moreover, the degree of the increase in the novelty of a participant's generated ideas was linked to their relational reasoning ability. Specifically, those participants with greater ability to reason relationally experienced a greater increase in ideation success when using the TRIZ method. These empirical findings support existing theoretical accounts of the TRIZ method as an implicitly analogically driven design method. Implications for engineering practice and education, such as the potential to identify individuals most likely to have success in design innovation using tests of relational reasoning, as well as the potential for systematically supporting relational reasoning ability in all students, are discussed.
As a profession, acting is marked by a high-level of economic and social riskiness concomitantly with the possibility for artistic satisfaction and/or public admiration. Current understanding of the psychological attributes that distinguish professional actors is incomplete. Here, we compare samples of professional actors (n = 104), undergraduate student actors (n = 100), and non-acting adults (n = 92) on 26 psychological dimensions and use machine-learning methods to classify participants based on these attributes. Nearly all of the attributes measured here displayed significant univariate mean differences across the three groups, with the strongest effect sizes being on Creative Activities, Openness, and Extraversion. A cross-validated Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) classification model was capable of identifying actors (either professional or student) from non-actors with a 92% accuracy and was able to sort professional from student actors with a 96% accuracy when age was included in the model, and a 68% accuracy with only psychological attributes included. In these LASSO models, actors in general were distinguished by high levels of Openness, Assertiveness, and Elaboration, but professional actors were specifically marked by high levels of Originality, Volatility, and Literary Activities.
Neither the theoretical conceptualization of validity, validation methodologies, nor the relative importance of different aspects of validity in measure development, is static over time. With the evolution of social values, validity evidence based on testing consequences has received greater attention in measurement research and practice. However, the methodological basis for generating this type of validity evidence is relatively underdeveloped compared to other psychometric properties (e.g., dimensionality, content validity, and reliability). The Consequential Validity Ratio (CVR) is a recently developed method for quantifying and representing how well test scores avoid the improper influence of participant demographics in the prediction of a validation criterion. The original CVR can only be applied when the criterion measures are continuous; however, binary criteria are also common in scale validation practice. This study theoretically proposes six candidate formulas for the CVR that can be used with binary criteria in a logistic regression framework (i.e., CVRB). A simulation analysis with a two-factor design was conducted to help determine the final formulation of the CVRB. The final formulation is conceptually aligned with the original CVR, straightforward to calculate, intuitive to interpret, and has adequate efficacy in generating evidence for the consequential basis of validity.
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Psychometric models for longitudinal test scores typically estimate quantities associated with single-administration tests, like ability at each time-point. However, models for longitudinal tests have not considered opportunities to estimate new quantities that are unavailable from single-administration tests. Specifically, we discuss dynamic measurement models - which combine aspects of longitudinal IRT, nonlinear growth models, and dynamic assessment - to directly estimate capacity, defined as the expected future score once the construct has fully developed. After discussing the history and connecting these areas into a single framework, we apply the model to verbal test scores from the Intergenerational Studies, which follow 494 people from 3 to 72 years old. The goal is to predict adult verbal scores (Age ≥ 34) from adolescent scores (Age ≤ 20). We held-out the adult data for prediction and compared predictions from traditional longitudinal IRT ability scores and proposed dynamic measurement capacity scores from models fit to the adolescent data. Results showed that the R2 from capacity scores were 2.5 times larger than the R2 from longitudinal IRT ability scores (43% vs. 16%), providing some evidence that exploring new quantities available from longitudinal testing could be worthwhile when an interest in testing is forecasting future performance.
ABSTRACT How does creativity develop from a nearly ubiquitous and domain‐general capacity associated with playfulness and openness to experience to a highly rarified and domain‐specific ability associated with invention and innovation? In this short report, I describe creativity along two dimensions: self‐ and socially referenced creativity. In self‐referenced creativity, only the creators themselves judge the novelty and usefulness of an idea, while in socially referenced creativity, others make the judgments. For education to support creativity, it should therefore leverage (not squash) the self‐referenced creativity that learners enter schooling with, while simultaneously supporting learners in a transition to more socially referenced creativity within a domain. Based on the psychological characteristics of learners at different points in their academic development, I suggest activities that would be maximally fruitful in the process of developing domain creativity. Because these activities allow learners to engage their self‐referenced creativity but also require them to apply their domain knowledge to predict what others in the domain would view as novel or useful, they support the development of socially referenced creativity and exemplify the goals of creative education.
