A Rasch Measure of Fostering Creativity

A general creativity questionnaire of 21 stem-items was designed and based on 7 teaching aspects of fostering creativity in higher education students: (a) teaching the skills and attitudes of creativity; (b) teaching the creative methods of the disciplines; (c) developing a problem-friendly classroom; (d) using prior knowledge; (e) using different types of problems; (f) using multi-disciplinary hands-on projects; and (g) using appropriate lesson plans. Stem-items (21) based on these were conceptualized from easy to hard—3 stem-items for each of the 7 aspects—and answered in 2 perspectives: (a) an attitude self-view (ideally this is what I think I should do) and (b) a behavior self-view (this is what I actually do)—using 3 ordered response categories: none or some of the time (score 1), most of the time (score 2), and all of the time (score 3). This meant that the effective item sample was 42. The general questionnaire was applied to a lecturer sample from a higher institution, N = 124. Data were analyzed with a Rasch measurement model computer program. The item-trait interaction chi-square was not statistically significant (χ² = 87.6, df = 84, p = 0.37), meaning that a unidimensional trait (called fostering creativity) was measured in which the 42 items each fitted the measurement model with p > 0.02. The Person Separation Index was 0.78 and the Cronbach Alpha was 0.79 showing that the measures were well-separated along the scale in comparison to the errors.