How did Land's 1968 study define and score divergent thinking and creative potential?
Executive summary
George Land’s widely cited 1968 work used a creativity assessment he developed for NASA to measure divergent thinking (the ability to generate many different ideas or uses for an object) and scored participants against a “creative genius” threshold; Land reported very high scores for preschoolers (often quoted as 98% for 4–5 year‑olds) that declined with age to around 2% in adults [1] [2] [3]. Available sources agree on the test’s focus on divergent versus convergent thinking and on the dramatic decline pattern, but they differ in sample-size descriptions and offer limited methodological detail about scoring procedures [2] [4] [5].
1. What Land called “divergent thinking” — a working definition
Land defined divergent thinking as the capacity to look at a problem and propose multiple, novel uses or solutions rather than single “right” answers; his assessment emphasized generating many distinct responses (for example, uses for a paperclip) as the hallmark of creative potential [5] [6] [3].
2. The test Land used — origin and tasks
The assessment Land adapted from his NASA work is commonly described as an “imaginative” or “divergent thinking” test created to help identify innovative engineers and scientists; descriptions across sources say it asked children to produce multiple uses or solutions (paperclip examples recur), but specific test items and administration protocols are not fully reproduced in the available summaries [1] [6] [3].
3. How scoring is reported in the coverage
Secondary accounts report that Land scored participants by counting the number and originality of responses and then categorizing scores against a “creative genius” benchmark—leading to headline proportions (e.g., 98% of preschoolers, 32% of 10‑year‑olds, 12% of 15‑year‑olds, and 2% of adults). However, the summaries do not provide the precise scoring rubric, thresholds, or reliability statistics; they present outcomes in percentage form without the raw scoring rules or psychometric detail [1] [4] [2].
4. Sample sizes and longitudinal claims — inconsistent reporting
Most sources agree Land tested young children (often cited as 1,600 children aged about 3–5 or 4–5) and later retested subsets at ages 10 and 15, and also administered the measure to large adult samples (figures like 280,000 adults appear in some summaries). But reporting varies—some accounts say 1,600, others say 16,000 or different adult totals—so the secondary literature is inconsistent about exact sample sizes and how representative the cohorts were [2] [5] [3].
5. What the decline claim means — interpretation and agendas
Land concluded that conventional schooling and socialization suppress divergent thinking: children naturally produce many novel ideas, and schooling trains early convergence (judging and narrowing ideas), producing the observed decline in scored creativity with age. Many popular write‑ups promote an educational reform agenda—arguing for more unstructured idea generation—so readers should note that these articles often use Land’s percentages to support calls for pedagogical change [1] [7] [8].
6. Methodological gaps and limits in the available summaries
The available reporting repeatedly states tests and percent outcomes but omits key methodological details: the exact scoring rubric, how “genius” thresholds were defined, inter‑rater scoring procedures, sample selection and attrition between age waves, and whether normative corrections were applied. Because these items are not included in the summarized sources, they limit how confidently one can evaluate the strength of Land’s psychometric claims [2] [3] [4].
7. Alternative viewpoints and cautionary notes
Some commentators and researchers question the broad conclusions drawn from Land’s numbers—pointing out that different creativity measures, cultural contexts, or testing conditions can change outcomes—and caution against overgeneralizing that “we’re all born geniuses.” The summaries here note critics (e.g., educators and foundation researchers) who challenge the assumptions behind the headlines, but the specific critical analyses or replication studies are not spelled out in the provided sources [9] [10].
8. Bottom line for readers and practitioners
Land’s study, as presented in popular coverage, defined divergent thinking as fluency and originality of multiple ideas and reported striking declines from early childhood to adulthood using a NASA‑derived test; however, the published summaries lack full scoring details and show inconsistencies in sample reporting, so policymakers and educators should treat the famous percentage figures as suggestive rather than definitive without consulting the original technical materials or independent replications [1] [2] [5].