Boris Forthmann

University of Münster | WWU · Institute of Psychology in Education

In recent years, the importance of mobile devices has increased for education in general and more specifically for science and mathematics education. In the classroom, approaches for teaching with mobile devices include using student-owned devices (“bring your own device”; BYOD approach) or using school-owned devices from central pools (POOL approa...

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 reli...

We collected international studies that have used the Passionate Love Scale, the Love Attitudes Scale and the Triangular Love Scale in order to check the stability of reliability estimates of these measures across different cultures until mid-2017. We used cultural dimensions to verify if the different love components of these scales could have som...

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) t...

Creative thinking is considered an important 21st century skill. Nevertheless, our understanding of how contextual factors such as socio-economic status and gender affect creativity is still limited – especially from an international perspective. In the current study, we thus examined the impact of gender and socio-economic status on creative think...

Divergent thinking (DT) tasks are among the most established approaches to assess creative potential. Although DT assessments are widely used, there exist many variants on how DT tasks can be administered and scored. We present findings from a preregistered, systematic review of DT assessment methods aiming to determine the prevalence of various DT...

Creative thinking transforms existing information, either from long-term memory or external sources, into new representations and innovative ideas. Creative thinking is an activity that processes received information to produce new representations and innovative ideas. Developing this skill is essential for students; however, recent research has ye...

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 measur...

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 succe...

Divergent thinking (DT) ability is widely regarded as a central cognitive capacity underlying creativity. The scoring of DT performance, however, is challenging since DT tasks yield a variable number of responses with varying levels of creative quality. Over the years, many different approaches for the scoring of DT tasks have been proposed, which...

While a rich methodology for analyzing response patterns for accuracy and time-on-task is at hand via Item Response Theory (IRT), tests with time cutoffs are so far harder to handle. Given that this test mode is widely applied, especially in the context of paper-and-pencil testing, there is a lack of psychometric techniques for a relevant number of...

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 bo...

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 diver...

Teachers' attitudes, self-efficacy, and subjective norm influence the realization of inclusive education. Recent educational changes in Germany may have affected these variables and their influence on behavioral intentions. Applying the Theory of Planned Behavior, this study examines how teachers' inclusive intentions and their predictors have evol...

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 s...

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 i...

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 diver...

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...

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 disc...

Creative thinking is a process through which individuals generate ideas that are simultaneously novel and meaningful within a given social context. Historically, psychologists have closely studied the general creative capacity of young learners, as well as the domain-specific creativity of experts. However, the developmental trajectory from childre...

Divergent thinking (DT) tasks are among the most established approaches to assess creative potential. Although DT assessments are widely used, there exist many variants on how DT tasks can be administered and scored. We present findings from a preregistered, systematic review of DT assessment methods aiming to determine the prevalence of various DT...

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...

A situational judgment test (SJT) is a psychological instrument typically used to assess the suitability of applicants in personnel selection or development. Interest in SJTs has increased over the past decades as research has shown considerable validity of SJTs and various other benefits. Researchers often provide information about internal consis...

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 an...

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): “v...

In response to pandemic-related learning gaps, educational policies have been put in place to help close those gaps. In this Think Piece, we complement existing analyses of the compensatory programs with a discussion of the role that student assessment plays both at the level of system monitoring and in guiding instructional decisions in the respec...

Even though a relationship between psychopathology and creativity has been postulated since the time of ancient Greece, systematic meta-analyses on this topic are still scarce. Thus, the metaanalysis described here can be considered the first to date that specifically focuses on the relationship between creative potential, as measured by divergent...

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...

Scoring divergent thinking tasks opens multiple avenues and possibilities – decisions researchers have to make. While some scholars postulate that scoring should focus on the best ideas provided, the measurement of the best responses (e.g., “top scoring”) comes along with challenges. More specifically, compared to the average quality across all res...

Creativity research often relies on human raters to judge the novelty of participants’ responses on open- ended tasks, such as the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). Albeit useful, manual ratings are subjective and labor intensive. To address these limitations, researchers increasingly use automatic scoring methods based on a natural language processing te...

The present study aimed to integrate evidence on the relationship among broad retrieval ability (Gr), processing speed (Gs), and divergent thinking (DT) with a three-level meta-analytic approach. The analysis was conducted on 560 effect sizes obtained from 47 studies with an overall sample of 10,391 participants. Results indicated moderate mean cor...

To put creative ideas and insights into action, people need to overcome obstacles, monitor their processes, and effectively evaluate the steps they take. Across two studies (N = 832 and N = 843), we explored the structure, correlates, and cross-domain similarity and specificity of creative self-regulation. Both studies supported a seven-factor mode...

In education, among the most anticipated consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are that student performance will stagnate or decline and that existing inequities will increase. Although some studies suggest a decline in student performance and widening learning gaps, the picture is less clear than expected. In this study, we add to the existing lit...

The present study aimed to integrate evidence on the relationship among divergent thinking (DT), broad retrieval ability (Gr), and processing speed (Gs) with a three-level meta-analytic approach. The analysis was conducted on 536 effect sizes obtained from 41 studies with an overall sample of 9055 participants. Results indicated moderate mean corre...

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...

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...

The equal odds baseline model of creative scientific productivity proposes that the number of high-quality works depends linearly on the number of total works. In addition, the equal odds baseline implies that the percentage of high-quality works and total works are uncorrelated. The tilted funnel hypothesis proposes that the linear regression impl...

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...

This study explores long-term stability of creative self-concept variables, which have gained attention in the past decade, but lacked specific longitudinal investigation and strong analytical decisions. We conducted two higher-order confirmatory factor analyses based on latent state-trait theory to demonstrate the underlying latent structure of tw...

The goal of the current study was to gain insight into what elements encompass business-as-usual (BAU) reading instruction and to what extent BAU reading instruction includes elements that have been found to positively impact reading competence. In addition, we examined whether and how these evidence-based elements are incorporated and how they clu...

Semantic distance scoring provides an attractive alternative to other scoring approaches for responses in creative thinking tasks. In addition, evidence in support of semantic distance scoring has increased over the last few years. In one recent approach, it has been proposed to combine multiple semantic spaces to better balance the idiosyncratic i...

The idea of data-based decision-making (DBDM) at the classroom level is that teachers use assessment data to adapt their instruction to students’ individual needs and thus improve students’ learning progress. In this study, we first investigate this theoretically assumed DBDM process, and second, we evaluate the effectiveness of teacher support on...

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...

Aesthetics is essential to the design of products. Nevertheless, aesthetic quality is often assessed with inaccurate, ad hoc scales. Therefore, we have developed the Product Aesthetics Inventory (PAI) and its short version, the PAI-S. A Pre-Study using face-to-face interviews (N = 6 design experts, N = 4 product users) served as basis for the devel...

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...

Creativity research often relies on human raters to judge the novelty of participants’ responses on open-ended tasks, such as the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). Albeit useful, manual ratings are subjective and labor intensive. To address these limitations, researchers increasingly use automatic scoring methods based on a natural language processing tec...

Although the behaviors displayed by assessees are the currency of assessment centers (ACs), they have remained largely unexplored. This is surprising because a better understanding of assessees’ behaviors may provide the missing link between research on the determinants of assessee performance and research on the validity of performance ratings. Th...

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 co...

Although the behaviors displayed by assessees are considered to be the currency of assessment centers (ACs), they have remained largely unexplored. This is surprising because a better understanding of assessees’ behaviors may provide the missing link between research on the determinants of assessee performance and research on the validity of perfor...

Monitoring the progress of student learning is an important part of teachers’ data-based decision making. One such tool that can equip teachers with information about students’ learning progress throughout the school year and thus facilitate monitoring and instructional decision making is learning progress assessments. In practical contexts and res...

Learning progress assessments (LPA) are increasingly used by teachers to inform instructional decisions. This study presents evidence for the reliability, validity, and measurement invariance of a newly developed LPA for reading in Grade 2 (quop-L2 – quop Lesetest für zweite Klassen) that assesses the development of reading comprehension in German...

Background We examine the role of learning-family conflicts for the relation between commuting strain and health in a sample of medical university students. The first goal of the study was to investigate the mediating role of learning-family conflicts. The second goal was to extend the temporal view on relations between study variables. Therefore,...

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 quan...

Correlations are ubiquitous in scientometric research. The present work illustrates a formula to quantify the predicted correlation between a composite indicator and a primary indicator (i.e., the composite indicator can be expressed as a weighted sum of the primary indicator), for example. Total citations received and number of self-citations or t...

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 identifyin...

Both researchers and practitioners agree that having highly engaged employees results in individuals and organizations reaping various positive consequences related to performance and absenteeism. However, available research syntheses date from the early years of this line of research, thus cover only a small fraction (under 10%) of the available s...

Social skills (e.g., persuading others, showing compassion, staying calm) are of key importance in work and education settings. Accordingly, the goal of many selection processes is to identify candidates who excel in desired skills. For this, high-fidelity simulations such as assessment centers (ACs) are regarded as ideal procedures because they ca...

This paper presents a meta-analysis of the links between intelligence test scores and creative achievement. A three-level meta-analysis of 117 correlation coefficients from 30 studies found a correlation of r = .16 (95% CI: .12, .19), closely mirroring previous meta-analytic findings. The estimated effects were stronger for overall creative achieve...

Creativity—as any other object of scientific endeavor—requires a sound measurement that adheres to quality criteria. For decades, creativity science has been criticized as falling short in developing valid and reliable measures of creative potential, activity, and achievement. Recent years have witnessed growth of theoretical and empirical works th...

Even though a relationship between psychopathology and creativity has been postulated since the time of ancient Greece, systematic meta-analyses on this topic are still scarce. Thus, the meta-analysis described here can be considered the first to date that specifically focuses on the relationship between creative potential, as measured by divergent...

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 fra...

Theoretischer Hintergrund Zu den von Politiker*innen, Lehrkräften und Forschenden am meisten befürchteten Folgen der COVID-19 Pandemie im Bildungsbereich gehört, dass die Lernleistungen stagnieren oder sinken und dass bestehende Ungleichheiten zunehmen (Forsa, 2020; Leopoldina, 2020). Diese Sorgen sind aus mehreren Gründen berechtigt, denn a) Sch...

This paper presents a meta-analysis of the links between intelligence test scores and creative achievement. A three-level meta-analysis of 117 correlation coefficients from 30 studies has found a correlation of r = .16 (95% CI: .12, .19), closely mirroring previous meta-analytic findings. The estimated effects were stronger for overall creative ach...

This paper provides a meta-analytic update on the relationship between intelligence and divergent thinking (DT), as research on this topic has increased, and methods have diversified since Kim’s meta-analysis in 2005. A three-level meta-analysis was used to analyze 875 correlation coefficients from 112 studies with an overall N = 33,897. The overal...

Social skills (e.g., persuading others, showing compassion, staying calm) are of key importance in work and education settings. Accordingly, the goal of many selection processes is to identify candidates who excel in desired skills. For this, high-fidelity simulations such as assessment centers (ACs) are regarded as ideal procedures because they ca...

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 equid...

Up to now, support for the idea that a controlled component exists in creative thought has mainly been supported by correlational studies; to further shed light on this issue, we employed an experimental approach. We used four alternate uses tasks that differed in instruction type (“be fluent” vs. “be creative”) and concurrent secondary workload (l...

Creativity—as any other object of scientific endeavor—requires a sound measurement that adheres to quality criteria. For decades, creativity science has been criticized as falling short in developing valid and reliable measures of creative potential, activity, and achievement. Recent years have witnessed growth of theoretical and empirical works th...

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 presen...

Die zunehmende Heterogenität der SchülerInnen geht mit der Herausforderung für Lehrkräfte einher, die unterschiedlichen Lernausgangslagen zu diagnostizieren und die schulische Förderung entsprechend differenziert zu gestalten. Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt mit der Lernverlaufsdiagnostik quop sowie dem Förderprogramm 'Der Lese-Sportler' ein Konzept...

Quantifying the creative quality of scholarly work is a difficult challenge, and, unsurprisingly, empirical research in this area is scarce. This investigation builds on the theoretical distinction between impact (e.g., citation counts) and creative quality (e.g., originality) and extends recent work on using objective measures to assess the origin...