Creativity assessments for students

Researchers have published a study in which they reviewed 11 years of research on creativity assessments and found the field is focusing on three main types of assessment between education and psychology. They note little innovation in the field and that the standard approaches are often gendered and racialized. The authors call for better understanding of creativity assessments to better serve all students, make creativity a more central part of education and better translate research to practice.

Creativity has been designated a critical 21st Century Skill by the National Research Council, yet there is not one ideal, accepted way to identify creative young people and encourage the strength as part of their education. A new study from the University of Kansas (KU) found that while creativity’s value has long been recognized, there are three primary methods of assessing it in young people. Those methods have pros and cons, including racialized, gendered and class-based approaches.

KU researchers analyzed studies published in eight major creativity, psychological and educational journals between 2010 and 2021 to get a better picture of the state of creativity assessments. The results showed that creativity continues to be primarily assessed by divergent thinking or creativity tests, self-report questionnaires, product-based subjective techniques and rating scales. That lack of innovation in assessments shows a refined approach is needed to build creative profiles of students, better understand how creativity develops through the span of education and encourage it in multiple domains of schooling, according to the researchers.

“There are a lot of conversations about how much improvement that creativity research in education needs. We want to promote creativity with schools and students through assessments that can be applied in classrooms. We also want to reform the current high-stakes, narrowly focused standardized tests in education -- maybe by using creativity assessments as an alternative,” said Haiying Long, associate professor of educational psychology and lead author of the study. “But before we are able to achieve these purposes, we want to have a better idea of the state of creativity assessments in education over the last decade and understand what has been done and what needs to be done.”

The study, written with co-authors Barbara Kerr, Williamson Family Distinguished Professor of Counseling Psychology, and Trina Emler and Max Birdnow, doctoral students in educational leadership and policy studies, all at KU, was published in the journal Review of Research in Education.

The analysis also showed that research on assessments in creativity tends to be evenly split between educational and psychological assessments. Those in education tend to focus on college more than K-12 education, while the psychological studies depend overwhelmingly on psychology undergraduates as research subjects. That is potentially problematic, the authors wrote, as those students overwhelmingly tend to be white and female, meaning they do not present a broader picture on how the assessments interact with diverse populations.

The studies are also increasingly international. That trend is encouraging, but the United States continues to lead the field. Because of that, students in many countries receive no creative assessments, while others take assessments developed in the U.S. that often do not directly translate to other languages and cultures, Long said.

Science Daily