Creativity & Innovation Toolkit

The main issues

Subjectivity

For most academics, the main issue in assessing students’ creativity is subjectivity. How do you make an objective judgement about the worth of someone else’s creative work, design, production, performance, idea, etc.? How do you put aside your own personal “taste,” or likes and dislikes as they relate to a work of art, for example, while assessing a student’s painting? Should you even try?

How do you decide whether you will assess the finished product or the creative process used to arrive at the finished product – or both? Which one of these represents the student’s major “learning outcomes?” What is more important – the journey or the arrival?

As an assessor, your judgement and your ability to judge creative work develops over time, and with experience in the specific field.

Criteria

Closely linked to these dilemmas is the question of the criteria to use when assessing creative work. Each creative work, or evidence of creative thinking, performance, idea, etc., represents one person’s (or a team’s) response to a particular problem. All you can do, as assessor, is to measure the effectiveness of that creative work, performance, idea, etc. within certain parameters, i.e., against the criteria it aimed to meet. Setting valid and reliable criteria to use when assessing students’ creativity, therefore, is absolutely crucial. These criteria need to include some that relate to the “fitness for purpose,” of the work, idea or solution, to make your assessment more objective.

Judging how effective a product or response is in terms of its creativity and fitness for purpose depends, of course, on the conditions and requirements of the context in which it occurs.

“Genuine creativity requires a further element over and above mere novelty: a product or response must be relevant to the issue at stake and must offer some kind of genuine solution, i.e., it must be effective.”

Cropley, A.J. (2001). Creativity in Education and Learning: A Guide for Teachers and Educators. London: Kogan Page p. 15.