The American Idol Effect: Are Students Good Judges of Their Creativity across Domains?

Abstract

Students are often asked to judge their own creativity. There is some evidence that such judgments correlate modestly with other self-report data and some divergent thinking test measures. Only limited work, however, has been done comparing self-reported creativity with actual creative performance. Because levels of self-reported creativity might vary across domains— which would allow greater likelihood of accuracy of such reports—we examined self-reports of creativity in four domains and compared these with expert ratings of subjects' work in those domains (as judged using the Consensual Assessment Technique). Subjects were 78 fourth-grade students. The students did not predict uniform levels of creativity for themselves across domains (all self-assessments correlated across domains less than .30). However, these predictions did not match expert ratings of the students' creative products in each domain. These results challenge the validity of self-assessments of creativity among students of this age, even when the students are given the opportunity to give themselves different creativity ratings in different domains.