Assessing students’ creativity: synthesis of 
higher education teacher views (June 2005)

Norman Jackson, The Higher Education Academy

Background

These notes have been compiled mainly from workshops held at the University of Hertfordshire (May 2005), University of Portsmouth (January 2005) and at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (USA) Wednesday (March 2004). They also include perspectives gained from discussions with subject practitioners in history, earth science and engineering and a few perspectives from the research literature. The paper is intended to promote further discussion about how we assess students’ creativity in higher education.

Introduction

Of all the aspects of creativity the one that poses the greatest challenge to teachers is how to assess / evaluate it. Creativity is a contested issue and it is perhaps most contested in the area of assessment. While many teachers believe that it is possible to help students use their creative abilities to better effect, far fewer think it is possible to assess these capabilities reliably and even fewer are prepared to try and do it. Yet evaluation is critical to the very idea of creativity.

The views of higher education teachers on whether creativity can be assessed fall into four camps. Some teachers believe that students’ creativity is evaluated through explicit assessment criteria. Others believe that insufficient attention is given to recognising students’ creativity and that at best the evaluation and recognition is implicit. The third group believe that is not possible and or desirable to assess creativity. While teachers in the fourth group value creativity but don’t know how to assess it. Looking at this optimistically I interpret this to mean that, most teachers with appropriate support, guidance and cultural encouragement could and would assess creativity in students’ higher education learning.

Most of the teachers participating in the Imaginative Curriculum network discussions however believe that aspects of creativity can be assessed or evaluated by teachers. Evaluation can be focused on products, processes or a combination of these.  

Paradoxically, many teachers also believe that assessment can be a major inhibitor of creativity. Learning emerges from creative processes in unpredictable ways. In some respects it is antithetic to outcomes based learning (OBL) that is predicated on a teacher’s notions of what will be valued at the end of the process. OBL also tends to focus on results rather than the process of acquiring the results – where creativity in action lies. It also does not permit failure (a distinct likelihood in high risk situations where students are attempting to do radical things for the first time). It encourages students to play safe… to achieve the outcomes intended by the teacher rather than the outcomes the student would like to achieve. And few assessment systems reward student determined outcomes. So assessment poses another serious structural and cultural challenge to the promotion of creativity.

The metaphor of ‘catching creativity’ emerged as being a useful way to represent the illusive and often intangible nature of the things that teachers were trying to assess when the focus was students’ creativity. The idea of catching something suggests that it is moving, transient, difficult to grab hold of, it is a concept that lends itself to other metaphors like catching the light or a ‘cold’ (being infected by creativity perhaps?). The question is who is doing the catching: teachers, students or both?

Some higher education teachers believe that creativity is a know it when you see it sort of thing. ‘Wow that’s clever.’ ‘I wish I had thought of that.’ ‘I wish I could do that.’ ‘I never thought of doing that in that way.’ But do we all see things the same way? And perhaps seeing possibilities in students’ manifestations of creativity is an example of how teachers themselves must be creative when they are evaluating students’ creativity.

Individuals can make judgements of worth (in terms of what they themselves value) but the issue is whether such judgements, which are inevitably subjective, have wider validity and when grading is a consideration whether such judgements can be made consistently by the same person.

A teacher’s perceptions of creativity are too limited and biased (too their own values) to be the only catcher. Neither can the teacher really appreciate the individual contexts from which students’ creativity has come. Perhaps a diverse group of teachers might be a more reliable way of judging creativity to minimize the bias of an individual i.e. more than one teacher catcher. In any case teachers would develop a better collective understanding if they talked about creativity using examples of students’ work or behaviours that they had encountered.

But perhaps real empowerment of students only comes when they can catch their own  creativity. Here the analogy with catching the light through reflection is an appropriate metaphor. Deliberate contemplation is integral to the self-awareness that is necessary to harness creative capability and to understand why something is creative.

If creativity is socially constructed then it is obligatory that the creative actors/artists (the students) are themselves involved in decisions about their own creativity. This raises the issue of students’ involvement in negotiating the criteria against which they will make claims and by which they will be judged. The extension of this logic is that the role of the teacher is to equip students with the necessary know how to recognize and judge their own creativity, and to develop the evidence to substantiate any claims. If creativity is socially constructed it is important that teachers model their own creativity for students to catch.

Teachers have to help students acquire the rules of learning in the subject, and then help them move beyond these frameworks for learning. Perhaps the ultimate purpose of a higher education might be to help students to develop the capacity to invent their own frameworks and processes for learning (for many different contexts). This type of creativity sits at the heart of an educational enterprise which is directed to engaging in complex learning.

Taking risks by moving into the unknown is part and parcel of trying to be creative. The risk of failure, (dropping the ball) by not accomplishing goals that have been set is higher. Teachers have to be willing to let students fail (not achieve all they wanted to achieve) and value failure if this is the result of creative endeavour.

Plagiarism is an important issue in assessment but many creative thinking techniques promote the idea of piggy backing on the ideas of others yet this is positively discouraged in mainstream academic work. However, students should be aware of the ethical dimensions of making claims for creativity that is not their own.

Insights: outcomes based assessment systems which assume that all learning can be predicted and that the teacher is the only person who can define what the outcomes should be is antithetic to learning that emerges in unpredictable ways – such as is produced through creative processes that pursue a sense of direction rather than a preordained pattern and specific criteria. This barrier can only be overcome if learners become partners in the assessment process. 

Perhaps the primary role of the teacher is not to define creativity for students and assess them against their criteria. Rather it is to help students recognise and understand their own creativity and help them express it and make claims against the evidence they feel is appropriate. 

The metaphor of catching the light through a reflective process might be appropriate for catching creativity which requires people to be conscious of their own means of engaging with complex learning to produce novel products or other outcomes.

What are we assessing when we seek to assess students’ creativities?

There are three approaches to evaluating/judging creativity in students’ learning: by product; by process and through a combination of these. In higher education products might include such things as: essays and many other forms of writing including, reports, diaries and reflective logs, poems, the products of electronic discussions; posters, the results of problem working, design and synthesis – like independent projects, laboratory or field notebooks. They include visual and graphical representations – designs, sketches, drawings paintings, photographs, videos, computer animations; physical and virtual models and constructions; performance – theatre, role play, simulation, dance, song, presentation – live or recorded. 

Similarly, there is an almost infinite number of possibilities for processes within which creative acts might occur and in which creative outcomes might be produced. Processes may be individually constructed and self-directed or be constructed collaboratively with other people or involve elements of both. They may be developed within a pedagogy – like enquiry or problem based learning, role play, design process or independent or team project. Or they may constitute rehearsals directed to creative performance as in music or dance. Process can be assessed through direct observation of students, through video or tape records or diaries, through reflective personal accounts supported by evidence that authenticates the account. 

When focusing on creativity the sorts of things that higher education teachers assess include:

Ideas and motivations
•	Vision and imagination
•	The amount and quality of ideas and how they are evaluated
•	Ownership of a project: the way it is personalised and made interesting and relevant to the individual.

Behaviours and processes
•	Manifestations of particular skills and abilities
•	Use of knowledge and understanding relevant to context
•	Attitudes
•	Critical thinking, including unlearning, relearning and new learning
•	How logical thinking and thinking that is not so logical but is associative are used, connected and integrated
•	Developing intuition
•	Students’ representations of their own creative process through reflective accounts that retrace experience (in light of reflection, conceptualisation, applied theory) and show criticality in thinking about How? Why? When? Where?

Outcomes and results of creative endeavour
•	Solutions to problems and how they are justified
•	Difference (standing out from the crowd)
•	Representations e.g. ability to write clearly and concisely; drawings and models; performance
•	Alternative solutions to a problem that relates to the client
•	Drawing previously unrecognised parallels between models, topics, situations
•	Student’s sense making
•	How knowledge and skills have been applied to a problem
•	How existing knowledge has been used in novel ways.

How do we assess? We –
•	Give clear outlines of how to gauge standards of work which they have access to.
•	Develop students - understanding of the power of being able to take risks.
•	Use unsolved real life problems to evaluate their creative skills.
•	Recognise creativity in others.
•	Examine the use and fluency of language
•	Evaluate presentations
•	Vivas
•	Portfolios - that provide context, evidence, process, decision making/justification, outcomes
•	Annotated album of learning
•	Scrap books
•	Blogging and messaging
•	Computer conferencing
•	Sketch books
•	Concept maps
•	Conduct interviews over a student identified dilemma
•	Use of crit sessions students defend their process, opinions etc.
•	Students are asked to set criteria within problem/need. Then change their role to solving the problem and providing evidence of learning against their criteria. 
•	Look for: portfolio of process, reflection, transfer of abilities to other disciplines
•	Project based with assessment of drawings, models, reflection. 

Example of teacher views in a sample of disciplines

‘At most levels creativity is rewarded particularly clearly in the context of research presentations (especially group research and dissertation work). Creativity is also apparent in the initiative that students show in their reading and analysis of debates reflected in essay and seminar work; initiative is rewarded where its products are used reflectively. Expressive creativity would be most apparent in the fluency and effectiveness of written expression – this is one of the assessment criteria for UG written work. The assessment criteria for degree classification reflect some facets of creativity and would appear to reward its expression, but it is not obvious that the assessment tasks always provide adequate scope for students to display their creativity, with the result that marks are often bunched around the IIii/IIi borderline’. History

`Most evidently in encouraging role play, particularly at Level One (e.g., decision-making simulation exercise), and in the Level Two double with Group Project. The latter includes assessment (with students given detailed criteria for marking so they know what is expected of them in terms of creativity) of individual and collective presentations, public outcomes (the nature of which normally chosen by each group), and joint, as well as individual, reports on reflective essays.’ History

‘Creativity is demonstrated when a solution to an engineering problem has a significant advantage over what has been done before - very high performance / very low cost / new approach.’ Engineering

‘We use a definition that is well-established in the literature that says the characteristics of a creative product (or process, or system) are: 1. Novelty (is it original and surprising?) 2. Relevance and effectiveness (does it do what it is supposed to?) 3. Elegance (is it a simple, easy to understand solution?) 4. Germinal (does it lead to other ideas, applications?) This has worked well as a basis for explaining various case study examples to students (e.g. the Berlin Airlift as a creative solution to a problem, or, the design of a mousetrap powered vehicle). Most recently we have refined this definition into what we call "functional creativity". This is an engineering-specific definition that encompasses the above criteria, but also gives them more order and weighting.’ Engineering

‘The evidence for creativity provided in summative assessment is primarily in the stories students’ tell – the way arguments are constructed and connected, the way they respond to new materials/ideas/data they have not previously encountered, the range of explanations/possibilities they offer, the way ideas are used and connected and the transfer of ideas from one context to another.’ Earth science

‘Some aspects of creativity are more difficult to assess than others. For example, assessing the creativity of a student who is a bad communicator; Subtle forms of synthesis and originality, and individual creative contributions in a group. Aspects that are easier to evaluate include: synthesis of ideas from different modules, developing a range of explanations and the visual presentation of data in an unexpected and effective way.’ Earth science

‘What we are looking at is a situation whereby the average student with the knowledge they had prior to the 'assessment' of their creativity has come up with something unexpected for the expected level of knowledge and its application to the problem they faced.’ Earth science

Reflection

There is almost universal agreement that understanding a students’ creativity depends to some extent on their ability to understand and explain it. Self awareness (metacognition) would seem to be a worthy and necessary partner to creativity.

'Reflection', which it may be suggested should go hand in hand with creativity to make it into a controlled activity rather than a happy accident!’ Engineering teacher

Criteria for assessing creativity

Evidence for creativity is more than evidence used in the assessment of other sorts of performance. There is a dichotomy between the individuality and originality we say we are trying to promote and the way we place boundaries on creativity when we come to assess through the criteria we use. There needs to be space for negotiation of assessment criteria and evidence in order to let individual student voices reveal their particular creative aspirations.

Criteria
•	Original interpretations of existing material
•	Critical clinical thinking
•	Reflection (insightful rather than obvious)
•	Ability to integrate and draw upon a wide range of material/experiences
•	Coping with multi factor and complex situations
•	Willing and learning to defend, to all parties, our judgment.
•	Positivist? Fair, valid, reliable?

Possible framework for assessing creative products in higher education

Probably the best collation of term for evaluating creative products is provided by Besemer and O’Quin (1987) and Table 1. Could this provide the basis for developing general criteria for assessing products in higher education?

Table 1 - Three domains and fourteen categories defining the characteristics of a creative product from Besemer and O’Quin (1987): 

Novelty
•	originality
•	germinality
•	transformationality
	Resolution
•	adequacy
•	appropriateness
•	usefulness
•	value
•	logic	Elaboration/synthesis
•	well-craftedness
•	attractiveness
•	expressiveness
•	complexity
•	elegance
•	unity	

How can we improve assessment for creativity?
•	Creativity in disciplinary learning must be assessed by professionals in the field. But such professionals need to be aware of their own creativity
•	The disciplinary field needs to be more aware of what it means to be creative
•	It is more helpful (to students) to assess creativity through a formative process
•	We need to find methods to facilitate/encourage – grade creativity
•	You can’t mark creativity to a % eg 57%
•	Through case studies
•	Observation of patients
•	Use reflective processes to surface personal processes
•	More widespread use of the ‘crit’ 
•	Discourse with peers and experts
•	Make creativity a continuous thread in the curriculum and assessment process
•	Offer evidence for justification.

Broad descriptors that view creativity holistically

‘Surely creativity needs to be assessed or judged rather than merely measured? That involves explicit criteria, and pretty soon you’ve spoilt the joke by explaining it.’ History teacher 

Creativity does not lend itself to grading in the same way as memory and application of subject specific knowledge. An alternative idea to emerge through the conversations with teachers was that we might be able to construct for a subject field or programme context a set of broad descriptors that embodied in a holistic sense the characteristics of being creative. This introduces the idea of level to the quality of a product or performance.

Such descriptors might elaborate a set of behaviours and outcomes that are associated with a particular creative enterprise. Broad descriptors might embrace such things as: originality, lateral thinking, generative thinking, viewing problem from different perspective, identifying multiple possibilities, ability to evaluate possibilities and justify approaches chosen.

Descriptors would need to be contextualised they might embody the types of behaviours that teachers say they are trying to develop in different subjects for example:

•	Analytical abilities (engineering)
•	Ability to apply theory to practice (engineering)
•	Awareness of personal freedom (informatics)
•	Capacity for generating ideas
•	Capacity to explore and discover
•	Clinical reasoning focused on the individual (occupational therapy)
•	Change within a student
•	Critical thinking (engineering)
•	Enquiry based exploration (engineering)
•	Exploration of other domains of knowledge/approaches (Informatics & Design)
•	Facilitation that unlocks imagination (OT)
•	Flexibility and fluidity
•	Generating ideas
•	Giving feedback (biology)
•	Giving guidance (biology)
•	Openness to possibilities (Informatics and Design)
•	Problem based learning (OT)
•	Problem finding
•	Problem solving
•	Promoting innovation
•	Reading 
•	Raise enthusiasm (English)
•	Relating to own experience (engineering)
•	Reasoning (engineering)
•	Risk taking (Academic Development: business)
•	Self-awareness
•	Thinking
o	Breadth of thinking (business)
o	Out of the box or lateral thinking
o	Idea generation
o	Critical thinking
o	Original thinking within boundaries (Accounting)
•	Understanding – being able to apply practice in context (project management)
•	Willingness to unlearn
•	Willingness to talk with other disciplines (engineering)

Are there levels of creativity?

Somewhere within the idea of assessing creative enterprise to produce creative products is the idea of level. Taylor (1959) elaborated the idea of five levels of creative engagement through the metaphor of an artist but the idea is transferable to any context and could help us understand the role of higher education in helping people develop within this spectrum.

1. Primitive and intuitive expression: The first level incorporates the primitive and intuitive expression found in children and in adults who have not been trained in art. There is an innocent quality to primitive art, but also directness and sensitivity. The naive artist creates for the joy of it.

2. Academic and technical level: The second level of creativity is the academic and technical level. At this level the artist learns skills and techniques, developing a proficiency that allows creative expression in myriad ways. The academic artist adds power to expression through the mastery of craft.

3. Inventive level: Many artists experiment with their craft, exploring different ways of using familiar tools and mediums. This heralds the level of invention. Breaking rules is the order of the day, challenging the boundaries of academic tradition, becoming increasingly adventurous and experimental. Inventors use academic tradition and skills as a stepping-stone into new frontiers.

4. Innovative level: At the level of innovation the artist, writer, musician, inventor, thinker is more original. Materials and methods that are out of the ordinary are introduced. Now the creator breaks the boundaries. The academic or inspirational foundation remains as a substructure of unconscious thought guiding these creative efforts.

5. Genius level: The fifth level of creativity is characterized as genius. There are individuals whose ideas and accomplishments in art and science defy explanation. Genius is arguably the one level that is unexplainable and perhaps unattainable, something that an individual is born with.

Within a higher education context perhaps we are striving to encourage the development of students’ creative potential at the second and third levels.

Creativity a hallmark of the highest levels of achievement

A number of teachers associate creativity with the highest levels of academic achievement. For example, ‘sometimes a good student will get it just right’; ‘a student cannot be successful without being creative’, ‘creativity, characterised by flair and imagination, is the mark of first class work’.

References

Bessemer, S. P. and O’Quin, K. (1987) Creative product analysis: testing a model by developing a judging instrument. In S.G. Isaksen (ed) Frontiers of Creativity: Beyond the Basics. Bearly Buffalo, NY 342-357.

Taylor, A (1959) The nature of creative process. In P. Smith (ed.) Creativity, Hastings House. New York.

Sources of information Higher Education Academy web pages
Creativity in Students’ Learning http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/creativity.htm

Creativity workshop notes http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/2804.htm

Subject Perspectives on Creativity http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/2762.htm

Version June 2005