The Innovative-Adaptive Model of the TTCT Figural Is Invariant Across Ethnicity but Not Gender

The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking-Figural (TTCT-F) is the most extensively used creativity measure in U.S. schools, especially for gifted identification. TTCT-F has been thought to be culturally fair across ethnicities and genders, although this belief has rarely been empirically tested. Our study examined the latent structure of the TTCT-F scales: Fluency, Originality, Elaboration, Abstractness of Titles (AT), and Resistance to Premature Closure (RPC), and then investigated measurement invariance across overrepresented and underrepresented ethnicities and across genders. Using data obtained from 379 U.S. elementary school students, we identified that the Innovative-Adaptive model, with an additional cross-loading for the RPC scale, was the best fit. We also found that this two-factor model was invariant across underrepresented and overrepresented ethnicities at configural, metric, and scalar levels. In contrast, even configural invariance did not hold across both boys and girls, suggesting that additional research is needed to understand creative thinking across gender.