Best Practices Page 2
Assessing
Creative Thinking As you continue to embark on incorporating 21st century learning into your curriculum, you must remember that you need to assess the learning skills to help students know what is expected and how to improve. It is important that you ask students to use their critical thinking and problem solving skills while you foster creativity in the tasks you give in your content area. When teaching and assessing creativity you should focus on four components: fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration. Fluency is the ability to brainstorm numerous ideas in a short period of time. Flexibility is ability to look at a problem from different perspectives, break routines and change patterns of thinking and formulate inferences from known facts. Originality is the ability to conceive something new, shift away from routines and offer inventive ideas and solutions. Elaboration is the ability to build on the ideas of others; to add new elements and enrich existing ideas. This article will focus on measuring creativity. You can measure creativity using a variety of tools:
You use a variety of formats to assess creativity:
Many teachers assess creativity through a product the student creates. Examples of products can be research papers, PowerPoint presentations, pamphlets, brochures, web pages, dioramas, science fair projects, drawings, plays, dances, skits, wikis, etc. Designing real-world authentic problems that demonstrate content knowledge usually involve a product that students develop and are a perfect way to demonstrate creativity. In addition, you might give students a task and let them be creative in the product they design to demonstrate their content knowledge. Creativity will usually be one part of the evaluation instrument for the product. It is important to specify the criteria for evaluation prior to the assignment. The criteria must be aligned with your learning objectives. You need to make it clear what you are looking for and not inhibit the creative process. There is more than one way to do something creatively; therefore, when you show examples from previous class work, you must be clear that this is just one way a student met the creativity criteria in the past and not the only way. You don’t want all students doing it exactly like the example. You want students to be innovative, resourceful and use higher-level thinking strategies when completing assignments. The assessment criteria should be specific so that you and peers can provide students with constructive feedback so that they can understand what they did well on this assignment as it relates to creativity and how they can improve in the future. Below are some examples of rubrics and checklists that include creativity in the assessment criteria. You can use these as a spring board to add creativity criteria to your assignments. Oral Presentation Rubric - http://www.phschool.com/professional_development/assessment/rub_oral_presentation.html Diamante Poem Rubric www.readwritethink.org/lesson_images/lesson258/power_rubric.pdf
Rubric for Individual Characterization http://www.readwritethink.org/lesson_images/lesson238/rubric_stage2.html Research Paper - http://www.sdst.org/shs/library/resrub.html Angela's Third Grade Art Rubric - http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/lessons/middle/RUBRIC3.htm A combined rubric with communication, creativity and critical thinking - http://www.ucwv.edu/shared/content/titleiii/rubrics/A%20combined%20rubric%20with%20communication,%20creativity,%20and%20critical%20thinking.doc Qualification Rubric - http://depts.inverhills.edu/LSPS/qualification_rubric.htm Intel® Education: Assessing Projects - http://wvde.state.wv.us/ose/Gifted/Giftedcreativityrubric-elem.doc Creativity Checklist - http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/management/atoz/C/creativityinschools/index.cfm?code=chec State Creativity Checklist - http://kcs2.knox.k12tn.net/kcsforms/PP/PP-PSY-620.pdf Foster creativity in your classroom and provide the assessment criteria to help your students learn and grow in this area so they can be successful in the future. Remember when assessing creativity to focus on the four components: fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration. Share what you create with the colleagues at your site so you are all using a common language. Many in education state that “what gets measured, gets taught” and we need to be sure we are measuring the 21st century learning skills. |
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