Campus News

Creative solutions

National Public Radio ran a story about the origins of measuring creativity. That story brought them to UGA to talk about the late E. Paul Torrance. He was the founder the UGA Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development and the creator of the Torrance Test, which measures students’ creativity.

Bonnie Cramond, director of the Torrance Center, described the kinds of children with whom Torrance worked in the 1950s at a military academy when he came up with the test.

“They were high-energy kids with ideas,” Cramond said on NPR’s All Things Considered, “and those don’t always fit into a very structured school situation. And so (Torrance) did a lot of research in how, for example, teachers much prefer highly intelligent kids and often don’t like highly creative kids because they are harder to control and they’re misunderstood.”