Students Creativity Assessment Through Gray’s “Forward Flow” Tool: A Preliminary Study

The promotion of creativity in education is intended to address many of the political challenges and goals for the development of a country, but among all of them the role of creativity in technology and economics is seen as crucial in helping nations to achieve higher employment, better economic performance and to cope with global competition. This study, currently in its preliminary phase, aims to compare the creativity levels of first-year students at a medium-sized Italian university. The degree courses in Engineering Management, Mechanical Engineering, Law and Motor Sciences were analyzed. In this analysis, students' creativity is measured with the "Forward Flow" test by Gray et al. This test implements a new metric that uses latent semantic analysis to measure the evolution of thoughts over time. Operationally, students are asked to produce a sequence of semantically related words from a given initial word. Latent semantic analysis calculates the semantic distance between words by examining the frequencywith which they appear together in a very large collection of documents. Studies conducted on the test, found in the literature, reveal that Forward Flow can predict the creativity of college students. According to these studies, even that membership in real-world creative groups (e.g. professional actors or entrepreneurs) is statistically predicted by scores on the Forward Flow test, even when controlling for divergent thinking.