**5. The Socio-Educational Context**

Several authors such as Sánchez, García, and Valdés [43] have indicated that in a country like Mexico, there are no valid or reliable instruments of measuring children's creativity. Therefore, it was considered indispensable to validate Torrance's creative thinking test for a sample of Mexican students and to confirm psychometric properties of creativity in the population analyzed. Creative development provides a path of maturation in which creative activity manifests itself at di fferent levels and in di fferent ways. The present research aimed to analyze the incidence of imaginative strategies solely for the narrative and drawing tasks assigned to the children of the fifth grade in primary schools in Guanajuato, Mexico. The application consisted of a set of imaginative strategies in narrative and drawing tasks for an experimental group, and also for children not subject to the program, or the control group.

The assumptions of Torrance [35] and the later Torrance (2008) were considered as the starting hypotheses. Individuals who exhibit high levels of creativity have a greater potential to benefit from creative educational experiences and could be compared to groups of children with high and low levels of creativity [34] as is also evidenced in the research of Olveira, Ferrándiz, Ferrando, Sainz, and Prieto [44]. As for the only specific precedence, Soto and colleagues [45] already analyzed the construct validity of the Torrance creative thinking test with a sample of 500 students from a primary school located in an urban-marginal zone of the Iztapalapa delegation in the Federal District of Mexico.

Soto and his colleagues found that children with high scores showed an increase in graphic (visual) creativity and also originality, elaboration, fluency, better title construction, and closure. Children with low scores demonstrated increases in visual creativity and indicators of fluidity, originality, and titles. It is important to note that, although significant improvement in total creativity was achieved in both groups, a separate analysis was done for the group of highly creative children. Positive changes were observed in all the indicators, while in the group with low observed creativity, increase was recorded only in fluency, originality, and title-writing. Likewise, a decrease in the values of elaboration and closure was found for the same by Soto and his colleagues. Di fferences in individual parameters support the need of considering a variety of indicators for evaluating creativity, since the scores exhibited significant increases in both intragroup and intergroup creativity, as well as in each one of the indicators discussed. Di fferent aspects of the same construct of creativity may show a certain independence from one another and this may be a desirable quality of the instruments of measurement.

Likewise, performance tests, questionnaires, self-reports, and tests involving subjective judgment have been used to assess creativity in children from other Latin American countries [23,46,47]. The tests of performance or skill that quantify the creative process, primarily of divergent thinking, are the tests that have focused most on the psychometric factors of creativity. In this sense, <sup>L</sup>ópez-Martinez and Navarro-Lozano [47] talks about tests of divergent thinking that are elaborated from Guilford's SOI test. We also refer to Perez and Avila [48], whose tests are based on Guilford's multifactorial theory of intelligence, which states that creativity is not an independent dimension, but is integrated in contexts of many cognitive functions. Performance tests in Spanish made considerable use of versions of the PIC instrument. In addition to performance tests, the *PIC* has related assessment tools: Self-report, questionnaires, inventories, and scales that evaluate the characteristics of members in the sample. But these tests have limitations and are specific to the objective of research. Based on what has been said, this study aims to analyze if there is a statistical relationship between the scores obtained in narrative and drawing manifests of creative imagination and, unlike Ramirez or Lopez's study of additional variables, aims to be a comparative analysis of factors that are agreed upon in the literature. The *PIC-A* tests is based on the Guilford test battery, the turtle test, and latest versions of Torrance, and may be explained in detail for purposes of arriving at conclusions regarding merits of relative factors in creativity and also their synergic relationship to the broad question of how creative imagination functions as a system.
