Creativity as an ability to produce novel, original work has been viewed in modern society as an important characteristic for professional success and personal development. Researches show that early identification of creative potential is an important condition for its further development. Actually we have limited the amount of information about the special features of creativity in the primary school gifted in different spheres. This study is focused on answering the question whether the creativity of intellectually gifted children of 7-8 years differs from creativity of their peers gifted in art, whether there are any peculiarities of creative thinking of intellectually gifted children and children gifted in art. A special instrument for creativity assessment (VFCT) in verbal and figural domain of activity was used to derive data from the children. The VFCT contains two divergent thinking tasks (verbal and figural), which measure fluency, flexibility, originality, elaboration and visual transformations. The children were showed the ambiguous figure and asked to make up as many different hypotheses of what it might be as they could (verbal task). After the verbal part the children were asked to draw as many pictures as they could using these very figures.
The total of 66 primary school students (51- intellectually gifted and 16 - gifted in art, aged of 7.5) participated in the research. The results showed that the creativity of the children gifted in art was manifested mainly in the figural task, while in their intellectually gifted peers - in the verbal task. The intellectually gifted children easily produce diverse ideas in the verbal plan, which leads to their high verbal fluency in comparison with their gifted in art peers. The gifted in art children focus on the ambiguous figure, reviving and spiritualizing it, which leads to high figural fluency, the originality and the elaboration.
The results indicate the complex creativity assessment in primary school students. The particularities of creative thinking testing depend on the domain of giftedness of the child.
This study was supported by Russian Foundation for Humanities (RFH), project № 14-06-00564.