Behaviorally operationalized creativity in children and its validity in the educational psychologists’, students’ and teachers’ ratings, while taking into account the effects of their implicit theories of creativity, were assessed in this study. The initial pool of behaviors displayed by children was rated by nine educational psychologists on prototypicality for creativity. The psychology students rated whether behaviors were representative of artistic, scientific or everyday creativity. Based on the rated creativity, the behaviors were divided into quintiles and arranged into 64 behavior groups. Three groups of students from the Faculty of Education (n = 147) rated all the behavior groups on creativity, from low to high. The instructions given to the raters differed; the first student group rated the behavior groups labeled as Children, the second student group rated the behavior groups labeled as Girls and the third group as Boys. The primary school teachers (n = 18) rated the same behavior groups labeled as Pupils. The results displayed the convergence of the educational psychologists’, the teachers’ and the students’ ratings of the creativity of behavior groups (r ≥ .9), with more weight in implicit theories of creativity given to the arts. The research findings are discussed regarding the ecological validity of creativity operationalization and measurement as a set of behaviors of predefined characteristics in the educational setting.

creativity in children, implicit theories, domain specificity, art bias