Relationship Between Creativity and Cognitive Style -- An Empirical Study.

Abstract

Creativity has been studied from various angles. People have been trying to track its origin through the routes of personality as well as cognitive skills. This study tries to look at creativity from the cognitive angle. The aim of this paper was to find out whether Cognitive Style has any determining effect on creativity. In other words creativity as an outcome of cognitive style constitutes the main perspective of the present study.567 Students (300 boys and 267 girls) of class VII and VIII of secondary schools in Kolkata were taken. 3 standardized tests and 1self-made information schedule were used. Test of Creative Words (TCW) and Test of Creative Figures (TCF) by Baqer Mehdi (1985), and Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT) by Oltman, Raskin and Witkin (1971) for measuring cognitive style were used. Descriptive, correlational and Discriminant Analysis was done. Findings revealed that a positive and significant correlation between creativity and cognitive style. However the factors discriminating between high creative, moderate and low creative are fluency, both verbal and non-verbal elaboration and originality; Cognitive style did not significantly discriminate between creativity groups [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]