Do Gifted Student Writers and Creative Writing Experts Rate Creativity the Same Way?

Abstract

Little research has been conducted on how gifted novices compare to experts in their judgments of creative writing. If novices and experts assign similar ratings, it could be argued that gifted novices are able to offer their peers feedback of a similar quality to that provided by experts. Such a finding would support the use of collaborative feedback in gifted classrooms. We asked gifted high school creative writers and three groups of experts (cognitive psychologists, creative writers, and teachers) to rate a set of 27 short stories and 28 poems for creativity using a scale of 1 to 6. The interrater agreement among the novices was within acceptable standards, and the agreement among the experts was very strong. When the ratings of novices were compared to the ratings of experts, a strong degree of correlation was found, supporting the use of peer feedback among gifted novice creative writers.