Cockcroft-Hartgill-2009

The purpose of this exploratory study was to determine whether or not children with learning disabilities, specifically children with dyslexia, were more creative than non-learning disabled children of the same age. Torrance’s Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) were administered to a group of 36 children with dyslexia in Grades four to seven, all attending the same remedial school. The scores obtained on the TTCT from the children with dyslexia were then compared to those of the normative sample for the TTCT. Results indicated that the children with dyslexia in all Grades were significantly better than the norm group at generating a large quantity of ideas. The children with dyslexia in Grade six also produced significantly more original responses than the non-learning disabled sample. It was concluded that the children with dyslexia within the current study may have higher than average ability on certain dimensions of creativity, and that these abilities could be drawn on when educating such children.