Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking explained: the Figural and Verbal tests, what fluency, originality, elaboration, abstractness of titles and resistance to premature closure mean, the 13 creative strengths, how STS scores them (standard scores and percentiles by grade and age), how schools use them for gifted identification, what a parent can do, and a printable sheet

The Torrance test is the one on the gifted-identification letter that parents have not heard of: not an ability test and not an achievement test, but a test of creative thinking, drawn or written, used to find children the ability tests miss. Its publisher, Scholastic Testing Service, describes it plainly and sells no preparation; this page follows that description.

Download the Torrance sheet (PDF) (the two tests, the five figural measures and 13 creative strengths, the three verbal measures, how scores are reported and the questions to ask; two pages, free).

What it is

The author, E. Paul Torrance (1915 to 2003), was a creativity and education researcher at the University of Georgia who spent his career refining the tests; STS notes that they require nothing of the child but to draw on their own experience, which is why they travel across languages and cultures better than most tests.

The Figural measures

The 13 creative strengths, scored from the drawings as present or not: emotional expressiveness, storytelling articulateness, movement or action, expressiveness of titles, synthesis of incomplete figures, synthesis of lines or circles, unusual visualization, internal visualization, extending or breaking boundaries, humor, richness of imagery, colorfulness of imagery, fantasy. A child who turns a few incomplete figures into a single scene with a story, gives it a title that is not a label, and adds a joke has shown several at once; a child who completes every figure as a separate, correctly drawn object has shown fluency and little else.

The Verbal measures

Fluency is the number of relevant responses; flexibility the number of different categories those responses fall into; originality the number that are statistically rare. The six activities ask the child to ask questions about a picture, to guess causes and consequences, to suggest ways to improve a toy, to think of unusual uses for an object, and to imagine what would happen if an improbable situation came true.

How the scores are reported

For the Figural test, STS's streamlined scoring gives a standard score for each of the five measures and for the creative strengths, with national percentiles (and local percentiles, if the school scores locally) by grade and by age, and the national percentile for the average standard score across the measures. For the Verbal test, standard scores and percentiles for the three measures. Scores can be returned by STS on paper or as PDFs, with a student data file for the district. The number a gifted committee usually looks at is the average standard score's percentile, often called the Creativity Index on reports.

How schools use it, and what it does and does not say

Federal and most state definitions of giftedness include creative capacity alongside intellectual and academic ability (the gifted page has the definition), and a district that identifies in that category needs a measure of it; the TTCT is by far the most used. It usually enters the process in one of two ways: as one measure in a matrix beside the CogAT or the NNAT, achievement scores and teacher ratings, so that a child with a 70th-percentile CogAT and a 97th-percentile TTCT can still qualify; or as the test for a specific creative-arts or creative-thinking programme.

What the score is: a standardised sample of divergent thinking under test conditions on one day, compared with a national norm group. What it is not: a measure of talent in art (drawing skill is not scored), of achievement, or of a fixed trait; Torrance himself framed it as creative potential, and the scores move with mood, instructions and practice more than ability scores do, which is why most districts use it with other evidence and some re-test.

What a parent can do

Tell the child what the test rewards: many ideas, unusual ideas, detail, and titles that say something. Then leave it. The childhood that scores well on it is the one with paper and pens around, with stories made up at bedtime, with "what if" entertained rather than corrected, and the week before the test is not when it is built. A child drilled to produce a rehearsed set of drawings is producing what a coach thought was original, which the originality norms, built on what thousands of children actually drew, are designed to catch.

Download the Torrance sheet (PDF) (the two tests, the measures, the scoring and the questions; two pages, free).

Where to get help

A 1-on-1 online class with a tutor who holds a master's degree and teaches the US curriculum from Grade 1 number work to AP Calculus, chemistry and physics, at 7 am before school, after 4 pm and on weekend mornings, US time, for US$10 to $13 an hour: the evaluation report read together in the free 30-minute first class, the subtest or cluster the score is really pointing at found, and the term spent on exactly that skill, with the method written out the way the school marks it. How online tutoring from India to the USA works, or the 1-on-1 online tutoring page.

Sources: Scholastic Testing Service, The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking and Gifted Education Products (the Figural TTCT for kindergarten through adult with three picture-based exercises and five mental characteristics; the 13 creative strengths; the Verbal TTCT for grade one through adult with six word-based exercises and three characteristics; the exercises' themes; grade- and age-related norms; standard scores and national and local percentiles by grade and age from the norms-technical manuals; the national percentile for the average standard score; local or STS scoring and report delivery; E. Paul Torrance, 1915 to 2003, University of Georgia). Fetched 9 November 2026.

Questions parents ask

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