Some types of instructions for creativity tasks (such as explicitly telling people to be creative) can boost performance. Showing people examples or telling them ways of approaching the problem before they begin a creativity task can help, but results are mixed about whether it is better to emphasize positive examples/approaches that can be emulated or negative examples/approaches that should be avoided. In this study, 198 participants wrote two brief essays-one under a positive exemplar instructional condition and one under a negative exemplar instructional condition. The results showed that the stories of participants written under the positive instructional condition were rated significantly higher in overall creativity, originality, and humor than the stories written under the negative instructional condition. Results are discussed in light of previous findings.

In this chapter, the authors describe the development and use of the Wesleyan Intercultural Competence Scale (WICS), a new instrument for assessing the effectiveness of study abroad programs. They begin by discussing the institutional and political context in which this instrument was developed. The authors then discuss different approaches to assessing intercultural competence found in the literature. The WICS was developed to build on Bennett's theoretical work but overcome the limitations associated with the IDI. Thirty participants responded to the survey twice (at the beginning and the end of their semester abroad). Their WICS scores were therefore examined to see if they captured changes in participants' intercultural competence. Finally, the authors summarize the methodology used in our work, as well as some results from early studies with the WICS. Along the way, they discuss false starts and challenges we encountered. The authors end by reflecting on lessons learned and providing recommendations for future research.

Researchers rely on psychometric principles when trying to gain understanding of unobservable psychological phenomena disconfounded from the methods used. Psychometric models provide us with tools to support this endeavour, but they are agnostic to the meaning researchers intend to attribute to the data. We define method effects as resulting from actions which weaken the psychometric structure of measurement, and argue that solution to this confounding will ultimately rest on testing whether data collected fit a psychometric model based on a substantive theory, rather than a search for a model that best fits the data. We highlight the importance of taking the notions of fundamental measurement seriously by reviewing distinctions between the Rasch measurement model and more generalised 2PL and 3PL IRT models. We then present two lines of research that highlight considerations of making method effects explicit in experimental designs. First, we contrast the use of experimental manipulations to study measurement reactivity during the assessment of metacognitive processes with factor-analytic research of the same. The former suggests differential performance-facilitating and -inhibiting reactivity as a function of other individual differences, whereas factor-analytic research suggests a ubiquitous monotonically predictive confidence factor. Second, we evaluate differential effects of context and source on within-individual variability indices of personality derived from multiple observations, highlighting again the importance of a structured and theoretically grounded observational framework. We conclude by arguing that substantive variables can act as method effects and should be considered at the time of design rather than after the fact, and without compromising measurement ideals.

It is often assumed that people with high ability in a domain will be excellent raters of quality within that same domain. This assumption is an underlying principle of using raters for creativity tasks, as in the Consensual Assessment Technique. While several prior studies have examined expert-novice differences in ratings, none have examined whether experts' ability to identify the quality of a creative product is being driven more by their ability to identify high quality work, low quality work, or both. To address this question, a sample of 142 participants completed individual difference measures and rated the quality of several sets of creative captions. Unbeknownst to the participants, the captions had been identified a prior by expert raters as being of particularly high or low quality. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that after controlling for participants' background and personality, those who scored significantly higher on any of three external measures of creativity also rated low-quality captions significantly lower than their peers; however, they did not rate the high-quality captions significantly higher. These findings support research in other domains suggesting that ratings of quality may be driven more by the lower end of the quality spectrum than the high end.

Through a study of school mission statements, this paper offers a unique examination and perspective on the shifting priorities of school.A random sample of 50 Massachusetts public high school mission statements was collected in 2001 and again in 2019.Analyzing the school mission statements using a pre-established coding rubric, 95% of schools had thematically changed their mission during this 18-year span.On average, the number of themes represented in mission statements increased from 5.1 to 6.2 per school.While emotional (91%), cognitive (86%), and civic (67%) development remained the most frequently occurring themes across mission statements, a significant increase in the frequency of career preparation (19% in 2001 to 38% in 2019) and challenging environment (38% in 2001 to 62% in 2019) was observed in 2019.Considerations of how local, state, and national reform efforts and policies may relate to trends in school purpose and mission statements themes are discussed.

Research on school mission statements at the K-12 level clearly indicates that schools are interested in developing more than just mathematics, science, reading, and writing skills in their students. A vast array of other skills including empathy, self-esteem, motivation, self-directed learning, citizenship, leadership, teamwork, and ethics are emphasized as well. School leaders often cite a lack of existing measures for these broader competencies as the primary reason why there is a discrepancy between the idealized competencies they seek to foster and those that get measured for accountability purposes. Thus, the main goal of this chapter is to provide school leaders and policy makers with a reference that will help them to easily identify strong psychometric measures of the skills and competencies that they aim to foster in their students with the hope of bringing measurement into alignment with mission. We begin by identifying various skills and competencies that schools aim to develop in their students. We then spend the bulk of the chapter summarizing the scientific research related to the measurement of a variety of broader competencies of interest to schools. Finally, we speculate on the implications of integrating the measurement of broader skills into school accountability and/or feedback systems.

Situational judgment tests (SJTs) have become an increasingly important tool for predicting employee performance; however, at least two key areas warrant further investigation. First, prior studies of SJTs have generally relied on samples from the western world, leaving open the question of the validity of using SJTs in the developing world where the majority of the world's workforce resides. Second, there is currently no standardized, theoretically‐based method for the development and scoring of SJTs. Therefore, SJTs are highly domain‐specific and must be developed anew for each new context. We report the results of three studies, conducted in India, that aim to: (1) test the cross‐cultural validity of SJTs in a non‐western context, and (2) examine the differential validity of 10 different approaches to scoring SJTs, some of which have the potential to resolve the problem of developing a theoretically‐infused, standardized approach to scoring and future development.

This study addressed whether prior successes with educational interventions grounded in the theory of successful intelligence could be replicated on a larger scale as the primary basis for instruction in language arts, mathematics, and science. A total of 7,702 4th-grade students in the United States, drawn from 223 elementary school classrooms in 113 schools in 35 towns (14 school districts) located in 9 states, participated in the program. Students were assigned, by classroom, to receive units of instruction that were based either upon the theory of successful intelligence (SI; analytical, creative, and practical instruction) or upon teaching as usual (weak control), memory instruction (strong control), or critical-thinking instruction (strong control). The amount of instruction was the same across groups. In the 23 comparisons across 10 content units in 3 academic domains, there were only a small number of instances in which students in the SI instructional groups generally performed statistically better than students in other conditions. There were even fewer instances where the different control conditions outperformed the SI students. Implications for the future of SI theory and the scalability of research efforts in general are discussed.

One of the most frequently cited aims of higher education institutions is to help students develop intercultural competence. Study abroad programs are a primary vehicle for helping to achieve this goal; however, it has been difficult to quantify their impact as most existing measures of intercultural competence rely on subjective self-report methods that are easy to fake and that suffer from ceiling effects when attempting to measure change over time. Building on Bennett’s (1986) developmental theory, the current paper describes a new test–the Wesleyan Intercultural Competence Scale (WICS)–that uses a situational judgment testing approach to measure the development of intercultural competence within the context of a study-abroad experience. A total of 97 study-abroad students from Wesleyan took the WICSalong with eight external validation measures and a background questionnaire. Thirty participants took the test at two time points–once at the beginning of a study-abroad program and once at the end. The results indicate that the WICShad strong evidence in support of its content, construct, and criterion-related validity. In addition, the WICSwas capable of detecting changes in the development of intercultural competence over time in a way that none of the other validation measures were. The substantive findings revealed that the amount of time spent speaking the local language and the number of different situations experienced were strong predictors of the development of intercultural competence. Implications and future directions are discussed.

This paper presents the development and preliminary evaluation of a new word recognition test (WRT) designed to measure individual differences in mental flexibility, defined as the ability to solve novel problems in unfamiliar settings. Conceptually designed to simulate problem solving in real world performance situations, the test was developed to recruit fluid and reproductive abilities and the interplay between convergent and divergent thinking. It is based on a framework that integrates and extends previous theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of cognitive ability and creative cognition. The WRT was administered with various cognitive ability and criterion measures to an undergraduate student sample (n = 266). Results provide preliminary evidence of construct validity. WRT scores correlated as expected with reference measures of cognitive ability, creative performance, and college performance (GPA). Regression analyses showed the WRT explained an additional 4.5% of variance in college performance over and above traditional cognitive ability measures that take up to five times as long to administer. Results suggest further study is warranted given the potential for its contribution to basic research and applied use. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.