Creativity & Innovation Toolkit

Guidelines for assessing students' creativity

1. Offer students as wide a range of assessment options as possible
2. Specify each aspect of creativity that will be assessed
3. Allow enough time to assess the creative elements in each assignment
4. Let students know the criteria
5. Show students how their expectations and your expectations align

Offer students as wide a range of assessment options as possible

Some students do well in essay or other written assignments; others excel under examination conditions; others like making things; performance is preferable for others, and so on. Wherever possible within the course constraints, offer students the choice of mode in which they are assessed.

For example, in Urban Analysis (2057EVP), a course in Environmental Planning at Griffith University, students are able to present their analysis of a creative work that provides a commentary of the urban environment, in the form of:

• A film;
• A piece of music;
• A novel;
• A poem;
• A television episode; or
• A piece of artwork.

In another assessment item within the same course, students can opt for a photo-essay, a sound recording, a short story, a letter to the editor of a local newspaper, or a short film. In this way, most students engage with the course material and use the assessment to demonstrate their own creativity.

Another way to encourage creativity is to ask students to present two different methods of solving one problem. Alternatively, leave out an important piece of information from the problem you set the students. Ask them to find and identify the missing link and explain its significance in setting and framing the problem. You could even try presenting a problem with an incorrect solution, and ask the students to identify the cause and explain what is needed to rectify the difficulty.

“In engineering, creativity and innovation are often fostered by close working partnerships between the university, students, staff and employers. Visualisation, reformulating problems, solving problems framed by industry, and assessing students using a variety of different methods (e.g., filming students in action to foster reflectivity; holding small group discussions/debriefs after work placements; setting reflective essays; conducting group critiques, etc.), foster students’ creativity.”

Innovation and Creativity in the Curriculum
Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 23 October, 2006.
http://www.innovations.ac.uk/btg/resources/publications/innovation.pdf