Academic Achievement, Intelligence, and Creativity: A Regression Surface Analysis

Data collected on 400 12-year-old English school children were used to examine relations between measures of intelligence, creativity and academic achievement. Complex multiple regression models, which included terms to account for the possible interaction and curvilinear relations between intelligence, creativity and academic achievement were used to construct regression surfaces. The surfaces showed that the traditional threshold hypothesis, which suggests that beyond a certain level of intelligence academic achievement is related increasingly to creativity and ceases to be related strongly to intelligence, was not supported. For some areas of academic performance the results suggest an alternate proposition, that creativity ceases to be related to achievement after a threshold level of intelligence has been reached. It was also found that at high levels of verbal ability, non-verbal ability and creativity appeared to have differential relations with academic achievement.