Boris Forthmann
Biographic Data
| ID | 2748729 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Boris Forthmann |
| GIVEN NAMES | Boris |
| FAMILY NAME | Forthmann |
| SIGNATURE | FORTHMANN B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Münster |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9755-7304 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Being female and being well-situated implies higher performance on creative thinking tests
Female students consistently outperform male students in creative thinking across 62 countries. • Socio-economic status (SES) is a strong predictor of creative thinking, comparable to mathematics and reading. • Gender and SES effects on creative thinking are stable globally, with minimal moderation by macro-level variables. Even in the time of artificial intelligence, creative thinking is considered an important 21st century skill. Nevertheless, …
Mapping creativity in the Pisa 2022 student and context questionnaires
Automated assessment of creativity in multilingual narratives
Researchers and educators interested in creative writing need a reliable and efficient tool to score the creativity of narratives, such as short stories. Typically, human raters manually assess narrative creativity, but such subjective scoring is limited by labor costs and rater disagreement. Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success on creativity tasks, yet they have not been applied to scoring narratives, including multilingual…
The Scientific Creative Thinking Test (SCTT)
Creative thinking is a primary driver of innovation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), allowing students and practitioners to generate novel hypotheses, flexibly connect information from diverse sources, and solve ill-defined problems. To foster creativity in STEM education, there is a crucial need for assessment tools for measuring STEM creativity that educators and researchers can apply to test how different teaching approach…
The Pisa 2022 Creative Thinking Assessment
The PISA 2022 Creative Thinking Assessment measures the ability to generate diverse ideas, that is, flexibility. However, since test‐takers only provide up to three responses, scoring flexibility is challenging. Employed scoring systems rely on dimensions such as linguistic diversity or category systems to quantify how dissimilar a test‐taker's responses are. In this work, I will revisit the flexibility scoring in the PISA 2022 Creative Thinking …
A MAD method to assess idea novelty
How stable is the creative self-concept? A latent state-trait analysis
Fifty years later and still working
Automated scoring of divergent thinking tasks is a current hot topic in creativity research.Most of the debated approaches are unsupervised machine learning approaches and researchers seemingly just started to evaluate supervised approaches.Hence, rediscovering the seminal work of Paulus et al. (1970) came as a big surprise to us.More than fifty years ago, they derived prediction formulas for an automated scoring of the Torrance Test of Creative …
Self-regulation for creative activity
Identifying the functional relationships between creativity and its constituents
International audience
Assessing the robustness of automated scoring of divergent thinking tasks with adversarial examples
R and Python Code for: "Assessing the robustness of automated scoring of divergent thinking tasks with adversarial examples"
Don't throw the “bad” ideas away! Multidimensional top scoring increases reliability of divergent thinking tasks
Disentangling Quantity and Quality in the Assessment of Creative Productions
Is quantity a confounding variable of quality? Does quantity breed quality? Could there be a potential trade-off between quantity and quality? Answers on these questions are theoretically and practically relevant for various areas of creativity research such as divergent thinking, brainstorming, or scientific productivity. In this paper, I will discuss and empirically illustrate recent research that indicates the importance of a comprehensive und…
Planning Missing Data Designs for Human Ratings in Creativity Research
Human ratings are ubiquitous in creativity research. Yet, the process of rating responses to creativity tasks – typically several hundred or thousands of responses, per rater – is often time-consuming and expensive. Planned missing data designs, where raters only rate a subset of the total number of responses, have been recently proposed as one possible solution to decrease overall rating time and monetary costs. However, researchers also need ra…
Reliable individual differences in researcher performance capacity estimates
Are latent variables of researcher performance capacity merely elaborate proxies of productivity? To investigate this research question, we propose extensions of recently used item-response theory models for the estimation of researcher performance capacity. We argue that productivity should be considered as a potential explanatory variable of reliable individual differences between researchers. Thus, we extend the Conway-Maxwell Poisson counts m…
Investigation of Response Aggregation Methods in Divergent Thinking Assessments
Divergent thinking (DT) ability is widely regarded as a central cognitive capacity underlying creativity, but its assessment is challenged by the fact that DT tasks yield a variable number of responses. Various approaches for the scoring of DT tasks have been proposed, which differ in how responses are evaluated and aggregated within a task. The present study aimed to identify methods that maximize psychometric quality while also reducing the con…
Effects of student-owned and provided mobile devices on mathematical modeling competence
Introduction Nowadays, more and more digital resources are used in modern mathematical modeling classes. In order to access these resources, students need a suitable digital device—often mobile devices are used for this purpose. There are several concepts to enable students access to such devices. For example, students can be allowed to use their self-owned devices [Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) concept] or teachers can hand out school-owned devic…
All that glitters is gold
The role of general work engagement and well‐being for vacation effects and for vacation fade‐out
Our study examines individual differences in vacation‐related well‐being gains by investigating general work engagement and general well‐being as moderators. We examined the effect of vacation on employees' affective well‐being (negative activation and vigor) concerning three different vacation effects (change in affective well‐being over time): “vacation effect (during)” (before‐during vacation), “vacation effect (after)” (before‐after vacation)…
Why summing up bibliometric indicators does not justify a composite indicator
Various bibliometric indicators have been used to assess the researchers’ impact, but composites of such indicators, namely a metric that combines various individual indicators to describe a complex construct, have received a strong critique thus far. We employ concepts from psychometrics to revisit a composite proposed by Ioannidis et al. (2020) that aimed to represent researcher impact. Based on a selected sample of highly cited researchers, ou…
Aiming at Creativity and Ending up with a Range from Low‐Hanging Fruits to Foolishness
The term “creative” is commonly used in everyday language and in academic discourse to discuss the nature of artistic and innovative productions. This usage inherently implies the existence of a variable of creativity that allows different creative works to be compared. The standard definition of creativity asserts that a production must possess both value and novelty in order to be considered truly creative. However, previous psychometric studie…
Automated Scoring of Scientific Creativity in German
Automated scoring is a current hot topic in creativity research. However, most research has focused on the English language and popular verbal creative thinking tasks, such as the alternate uses task. Therefore, in this study, we present a large language model approach for automated scoring of a scientific creative thinking task that assesses divergent ideation in experimental tasks in the German language. Participants are required to generate al…
Latent variable modeling of scientific impact
Statistical modeling of scientific productivity and impact provides insights into bibliometric measures used also to quantify differences between individual scholars. The Q model decomposes the log-transformed impact of a published paper into a researcher capacity parameter and a random luck parameter. These two parameters are then modeled together with the log-transformed number of published papers (i.e., an indicator of productivity) by means o…
Understanding Ability and Reliability Differences Measured with Count Items
In psychology and education, tests (e.g., reading tests) and self-reports (e.g., clinical questionnaires) generate counts, but corresponding Item Response Theory (IRT) methods are underdeveloped compared to binary data. Recent advances include the Two-Parameter Conway-Maxwell-Poisson model (2PCMPM), generalizing Rasch's Poisson Counts Model, with item-specific difficulty, discrimination, and dispersion parameters. Explaining differences in model …
A systematic quantitative review of divergent thinking assessments
Revisiting the interactive effect of multicultural experience and openness to experience on divergent thinking
Investigation of Response Aggregation Methods in Divergent Thinking Assessments
Divergent thinking (DT) ability is widely regarded as a central cognitive capacity underlying creativity, but its assessment is challenged by the fact that DT tasks yield a variable number of responses. Various approaches for the scoring of DT tasks have been proposed, which differ in how responses are evaluated and aggregated within a task. The present study aimed to identify methods that maximize psychometric quality while also reducing the con…
Scrutinizing the basis of originality in divergent thinking tests
BACKGROUND: The originality of divergent thinking (DT) production is one of the most critical indicators of creative potential. It is commonly scored using the statistical infrequency of responses relative to all responses provided in a given sample. AIMS: Response frequency estimates vary in terms of measurement precision. This issue has been widely overlooked and is addressed in the current study. SAMPLE AND METHOD: Secondary data analysis of 2…
Reasons for responding in student evaluation of teaching
Revisiting the interactive effect of multicultural experience and openness to experience on divergent thinking
Scoring divergent thinking tests
Understanding the confounding effect of fluency in divergent thinking scores
Investigating the quantity–quality relationship in scientific creativity
Among scientists who study scientific production, the relationship between the quantity of a scientist’s production and the quality of their work has long been a topic of empirical research and theoretical debate. One principal theoretical perspective on the quantity–quality relationship has been the equal odds baseline, which posits that a scientist’s number of high-quality products increases linearly with their total number of products, and tha…
Scrutinizing the basis of originality in divergent thinking tests
BACKGROUND: The originality of divergent thinking (DT) production is one of the most critical indicators of creative potential. It is commonly scored using the statistical infrequency of responses relative to all responses provided in a given sample. AIMS: Response frequency estimates vary in terms of measurement precision. This issue has been widely overlooked and is addressed in the current study. SAMPLE AND METHOD: Secondary data analysis of 2…
Support for Refugee Integration in West and East Germany
Prior research has reported less favorable attitudes toward and more violent crimes against ethnic out-group members in East (vs. West) Germany. We conducted two pre-registered lost letter studies in West versus East German cities (Study 1, N = 400) and in West versus East German rural areas (Study 2, N = 400). To investigate supportive behavior regarding refugee integration, we manipulated the addressee (refugee-integration vs. immigration-stop …
Testing equal odds in creativity research
Simonton’s equal odds baseline assumes that the number of creative hits is a positive linear function of the number of attempts (i.e., products). It has importance for productivity of innovators and scientists, small group brainstorming, and divergent thinking research. It has been proposed within a stochastic model for productions in the field of scientific creativity (e.g., publications of scientists). Tests of the equal odds baseline rely comm…
Strict Equal Odds
A thorough understanding of the relationship between quality and quantity of creative productions is critically important for creativity researchers and practitioners. The current study examines the equal odds baseline as a simple model to describe the quality–quantity relationship. Among other predictions, the equal odds baseline posits the presence of individual differences in hit ratios. In this work, the expected residual variance under the m…
Reliability of researcher capacity estimates and count data dispersion
Item-response models from the psychometric literature have been proposed for the estimation of researcher capacity. Canonical items that can be incorporated in such models to reflect researcher performance are count data (e.g., number of publications, number of citations). Count data can be modeled by Rasch’s Poisson counts model that assumes equidispersion (i.e., mean and variance must coincide). However, the mean can be larger as compared to th…
Effects of Data-Based Decision-Making on Low-Performing Readers in General Education Classrooms
In most general education classrooms in Germany, students with and without special educational needs are taught together. To support teachers in adapting instruction to these heterogeneous classrooms, we have developed learning progress assessment (LPA) and reading instructional materials, the Reading Sportsman (RS), in line with the theoretical framework of data-based decision-making, which has led to beneficial effects in several studies. Howev…
On the Conceptual Overlap between the Fluency Contamination Effect in Divergent Thinking Scores and the Chance View on Scientific Creativity
The equal odds baseline is a parsimonious model that describes the relationship between quantity and quality of output in scientific creativity. Specifically, it is posited that quality is a linear function of quantity, and therefore, strong positive correlations between these two variables are expected. Strong positive correlations also play a crucial role in a recurring issue in divergent thinking research: the fluency contamination effect. Thi…
A three-wave longitudinal study on the relation between commuting strain and somatic symptoms in university students
We demonstrated that learning-family conflicts explain why commuting may have unfavorable effects on health for medical students. We also showed that it is the long-term commuting experience that is related to health complaints and not the single commuting event. This means that short-term deviations from general levels of commuting strain do not cause somatic symptoms, but general high levels of commuting strain do instead
Multilevel and empirical reliability estimates of learning growth
Reliable learning progress information is crucial for teachers’ interpretation and data-based decision making in everyday classrooms. Slope estimates obtained from simple regression modeling or more complex latent growth models are typically used in this context as indicators of learning progress. Research on progress monitoring has used mainly two ways to estimate reliability of learning progress, namely (a) split-half reliability and (b) multil…
Semantic Distance and the Alternate Uses Task
Semantic distance is increasingly used for automated scoring of originality on divergent thinking tasks, such as the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). Despite some psychometric support for semantic distance – including positive correlations with human creativity ratings – additional work is needed to optimize its reliability and validity, including identifying maximally reliable items (objects) for AUT administration. We identify a set of 13 AUT items b…
Reach for the stars
Star inventors generate superior innovation outcomes. Their capacity to invent high-quality patents might be decisive beyond mere productivity. However, the relationship between quantitative and qualitative dimensions has not been exhaustively investigated. The equal odds baseline (EOB) framework can explicitly model this relationship. This work combines a theoretical model for creative production with recent calls in the patentometrics literatur…
Data-based decision-making in schools
Here, we provide all additional materials (including data and codes) to the following article: Data-based decision-making in schools: Examining the process and effects of teacher support The folder "Additional OSF materials" contains 1) Measurement invariance testing of reading achievement across cohorts and timepoints 2) Alternative results 3) Integrative data analysis for instructional decision-making The folder "Open data, open code, research …
Understanding ideational fluency as a survival process
BACKGROUND: When students generate ideas, important inter-individual variance exists both in the quantity and the quality of ideas they are able to produce (e.g., perfectionists who have few highly creative ideas or mass producers who produce a lot of uncreative ideas). In educational psychology research on creativity, the relation between the quantity and quality of ideas has not been well understood, limiting progress in this area. AIMS: We con…
Multilingual semantic distance
Creativity research commonly involves recruiting human raters to judge the originality of responses to divergent thinking tasks, such as the alternate uses task (AUT). These manual scoring practices have benefited the field, but they also have limitations, including labor-intensiveness and subjectivity, which can adversely impact the reliability and validity of assessments. To address these challenges, researchers are increasingly employing autom…
Researcher capacity estimation based on the Q model
Chance models of scientific creative productivity allow estimation of researcher capacity. One prominent such model is the Q model in which the impact of a scholarly work is modeled as a multiplicative function of researcher capacity and a potential impact (i.e., luck) parameter. Previous work estimated researcher capacity based on an approximation of the Q parameter. In this work, however, I outline how the Q model can be estimated within the fr…
The Machines Take Over
Traditionally, researchers employ human raters for scoring responses to creative thinking tasks. Apart from the associated costs this approach entails two potential risks. First, human raters can be subjective in their scoring behavior (inter‐rater‐variance). Second, individual raters are prone to inconsistent scoring patterns (intra‐rater‐variance). In light of these issues, we present an approach for automated scoring of Divergent Thinking (DT)…
Effects of student-owned and provided mobile devices on mathematical modeling competence
Introduction Nowadays, more and more digital resources are used in modern mathematical modeling classes. In order to access these resources, students need a suitable digital device—often mobile devices are used for this purpose. There are several concepts to enable students access to such devices. For example, students can be allowed to use their self-owned devices [Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) concept] or teachers can hand out school-owned devic…
All that glitters is gold
The role of general work engagement and well‐being for vacation effects and for vacation fade‐out
Our study examines individual differences in vacation‐related well‐being gains by investigating general work engagement and general well‐being as moderators. We examined the effect of vacation on employees' affective well‐being (negative activation and vigor) concerning three different vacation effects (change in affective well‐being over time): “vacation effect (during)” (before‐during vacation), “vacation effect (after)” (before‐after vacation)…
Why summing up bibliometric indicators does not justify a composite indicator
Various bibliometric indicators have been used to assess the researchers’ impact, but composites of such indicators, namely a metric that combines various individual indicators to describe a complex construct, have received a strong critique thus far. We employ concepts from psychometrics to revisit a composite proposed by Ioannidis et al. (2020) that aimed to represent researcher impact. Based on a selected sample of highly cited researchers, ou…
Psychology (35 works) · Computer Science (26 works) · Social Psychology (24 works) · Creativity in Education and Neuroscience (23 works) · Creativity (18 works) · Mathematics (17 works) · Statistics (15 works) · Cognitive psychology (13 works) · Econometrics (10 works) · Artificial Intelligence (8 works)