The single almost universally recognized aspect of creativity is novelty, often understood as novelty of products. However, determining which novel products are “truly” creative is difficult, because of the influence of practical and aesthetic/professional criteria. From a psychological point of view, it is more productive to study personal properties associated with creativity on the one hand and psychological processes which lead to the production of novelty on the other, especially with school children, since few of them produce widely acclaimed creative products. For this reason, creativity tests are most useful as indicators of potential. The tests can be divided into two groups: those concentrating on biographical and personal properties (creative person) and those which aim to measure creative thinking (creative process). Although a variety of tests of both kinds exists, their ability to measure real life creativity in a reliable way is open to doubt. This may well be because creativity involves a combination of psychological elements, with the result that its measurement requires new procedures that cross conventional test boundaries.

This paper argues that there is an inadequate supply of psychological tests that can be used for the assessment of intellectually gifted students. New psychological tests should be constructed for these purposes. The theories of experimental cognitive psychology which emphasize the role of capacity limitations and the importance of the construct of complexity provide a useful framework for the development of such new tests. Particularly promising has been the work with competing tasks, with tasks that place an increasing demandon the central processor (or working memory), and with tasks that systematically vary complexity and difficulty. Several examples of these new tasks are described.

The purpose of this paper is to provide some preliminary data on the vocational interests of a sample of Australian high school pupils. Subjects (N=935) from five high schools were administered the Career Interest Test, which provides idiographic, forced-choice assessments of Outdoor, Practical, Scientific, Creative, Business, Office, and People Contact vocational interests across the three dimensions of vocations, academic preferences, and leisure activity choices. Interests are not related to age but there are significant sex differences as well as interaction effects, with males higher on Outdoor and Practical and females higher on Creative and People Contact categories. Data are provided on male and females preferences for each of the 63 paired choices (i.e., 126 items). The intercorrelation of the interests was assessed in terms of Holland's vocational typology. The validity of vocational/academic/activity measures of interests was reflected in comparisons with expressed occupational choices. It was argued that interests may be considered in terms of work-task preferences and that male-female differences in interests are consistent with Gotffredson's role of stereotypes in interest development. The implications for the assessment of vocational inlerests are discussed in terms of item content, format, scoring, and interpretation.

Lateralized brain function was originally thought to be unique to humans, but it has now been demonstrated to occur in many animal species, including primates, rats, dogs, and birds. Memory consolidation and retrieval in chicks is lateralized in neuroanatomical areas used and also in the times these areas are active. As the general patterns of memory encoding, elucidated in chicks, might also occur in humans, chicks are used as a model system for studying learning and memory. In addition, the detailed neurochemical investigation of imprinting has shown that the neurotransmitter glutamate plays an important role in the consolidation of early learning. Glutamate is also known to be important in neural plasticity, and a close link is now seen between early memory formation and the neural plastic events of early brain development. Behavioural testing using chicks has shown that glutamate intake can cause retardation of visual discrimination learning. This is of some concern given the common use of glutamate as a food additive. Clearly the role and indeed the presence of glutamate in the brain are finely balanced. This information is leading us to a greater understanding of the brain and its dynamic interaction with its environment. It also reinforces the increasing concerns regarding neural interactions with environmental roxins.

Two studies investigated the influence of student behaviour and the gender of teacher and student respectively on teachers' decisions to refer children for specialist assistance. The first study examined the age, sex, and referral reason for 621 students referred to a major school support centre. The results indicated that twice as many boys were referred as girls, and that girls and boys were referred for different reasons. In the second study, 97 teachers were required to rank order the necessity for referral of four case studies presenting examples of either disruptive or non-disruptive behaviours. Boys' and girls' names were exchanged on alternate forms of the case studies. The findings indicated that neither the sex of the teacher nor the sex of the student in the case study hadany effect on teachers'rankings of the case studies. However, teachers viewed students displaying non-disruptive behaviour as significantly more in need of referral than students displaying disruptive behaviour. The implications of the findings of both studies are discussed in relation to the contrast between what teachers say about referrals and what they actually do, the access of girls to support services, and the need for further teacher education about criteria for referral.