A Critical Review of Assessments of Creativity in Education

Abstract

This chapter provides a systematic, synthesizing, and critical review of the literature related to assessments of creativity in education from historical, theoretical, empirical, and practical standpoints. We examined the assessments used in the articles focusing on education that are published from January 2010 to May 2021 in eight creativity, psychological, and educational journals. We found that the assessments of creativity in education are split between psychological and education research and have increased international participation. Additionally, these assessments are more general than specific and focus more on cognitive than noncognitive aspects. Like previous reviews of assessments of creativity in general, this review showed that creativity in education is still mainly assessed by divergent thinking or creativity tests, self-report questionnaires, and product-based subjective techniques. We analyzed the benefits and drawbacks of each approach and highlighted many innovations in the assessment. We further discussed how the major assessment approaches address race, ethnicity, class, and gender issues in education. We concluded the review with recommendations for how to better assess creativity in education and how assessments of creativity in education contribute to our understanding of the creative educational experience and democratizing education.

The relationship of divergent thinking with broad retrieval ability and processing speed: A meta-analysis

“…Further exploration of theoretical and empirical grounds on the DT-Gr relationship through synthesizing cognitive, psychometric, neurophysiological, and genetic evidence is warranted and will help to set a clearer border between the two constructs. Second, due to the presence of meta-analyses covering the relationship between DT and major cognitive abilities from the CHC framework (Gerwig et al, 2021;Gerver et al, 2022), as well as predominant reliance on DT tasks as measures of cognitive creative potential Long, 2014;Long et al, 2022), creativity researchers may be interested in shifting to other-perhaps more ecologically valid and domain-specific-measures of creative potential and to study the interaction of intelligence and creativity under more realistic conditions (see also Yang et al, 2022). For example, there are some exemplars in the field, including studies on creative drawing, writing, humor production, and jazz improvisation (Avitia & Kaufman, 2014;Beaty et al, 2013;Kellner & Benedek, 2017;Smith et al, 2022;Taylor & Barbot, 2021).…”

A longitudinal study of the effect of individual and socio-cultural factors on students’ creativity

“…Finally, we used students’ self-report as a measure of creativity. Although using self-report questionnaires is one of the four major approaches to creativity measure ( Long et al, 2022 ), it has limitations in that self-report may include individuals’ subjective judgment ( Biernat, 2003 ) and be related to reliability issues when reporting one’s own attitudes and behaviors. We expect to have a more reliable measure of creativity and the influence of cognitive and social factors by combining a self-report method together with an existing creativity test that can complement constructs the self-report did not cover.…”

Effects of homework creativity on academic achievement and creativity disposition: Evidence from comparisons with homework time and completion based on two independent Chinese samples

“…General creativity refers to the psychological attributes which can generate novel and valuable products (Kaufman and Glȃveanu, 2019;Sternberg and Karami, 2022). These psychological attributes typically included attitude (e.g., willing to take appropriate risk), motivations (e.g., intrinsic motivation, curiosity), abilities (e.g., divergent thinking), and personality (e.g., independence) (Kaufman and Glȃveanu, 2019;Long et al, 2022). These attributes can be assessed independently, or in the form of grouping (Plucker et al, 2019;Sternberg, 2019).…”