Figural, Symbolic, and Semantic Factors of Creative Potential in Ninth-Grade Students. Studies of Aptitudes of High-Level Personnel.

摘要

The major hypothesis was that 16 factors of figural, symbolic, and semantic divergent production, many of which had been demonstrated in adult male populations, could be demonstrated to exist and to be distinct from one another in a sample of ninth-grade students. In order to be confident that the 16 divergent-production factors were distinct from other known intellectual factors, seven reference factors were analyzed simultaneously. The reference factors for which marker tests were included were those that were expected possibly to play a role in performance on some of the divergent-thinking tests. Of the 57 test variables measuring intellectual factors, 50 exhibited their largest loadings on the factors upon which they were hypothesized to cohere, and 7 exhibited their largest loadings on factors other than those for which they were hypothesized. All the factors hypothesized were found in this study, identified, in the main, by the tests hypothesized to cohere upon them. Most of the tests, especially those leading their factors, exhibited low complexity. On this basis, it appears to be a safe conclusion that the obtained factors are essentially unrelated to one another and that the dimensionality of intellect is as great in the ninth-grade sample of examinees as it is in adults. The results strongly imply that Guilford's model of intellect can be accepted as appopriately reflecting the structures of human intelligence as revealed from the study of individual differences in mental functioning. (Author)