Abstract

A comparative study of 40 Malaysian and 32 American students’ creativity was carried out. Creativity was measured using the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, Figural Form A while measures of academic achievement were obtained from two latest class assessments extracted from school records. Findings indicate that the American students are significantly better than the Malaysian students in overall Figural Creativity as well as in its components, namely Fluency, Flexibility, Originality and Elaboration. However, there were no significant differences in the relationship between Creativity and Academic Achievement between Malaysian and American students. When these relationships were compared across the intelligence continuum, there appears to be consistently higher effect of intelligence on the strengths of these correlation coefficients at high IQ levels for the American students than the Malaysian students. Similar investigations are recommended using larger samples and samples of different age groups to further test the effect of intelligence on the creativity-academic achievement relationship.