Study shows creativity assessments progressing slowly, including racialized, gendered approaches

The National Research Council has identified creativity as a crucial 21st Century skill, but there isn't a single, widely approved method for identifying creative young people and supporting the quality as part of their education. While the benefits of creativity has long been acknowledged, a recent study from the University of Kansas discovered that there are three main ways to gauge it in young people. Racialized, gendered, and class-based strategies all have advantages and disadvantages.

To gain a better understanding of the current of creativity evaluations, KU researchers examined papers that were published in eight significant creative, psychological, and educational journals between 2010 and 2021. The findings demonstrated that self-report questionnaires, rating scales, and tests of divergent thinking or creativity are still the main methods used to evaluate creativity. According to the researchers, the lack of originality in evaluations demonstrates the need for a refined approach to establish creative profiles of students, better understand how creativity develops over the course of education, and promote it across many facets of schooling.

"There are several discussions about the need for improvement in creativity research in education. Through assessments that may be used in classrooms, we hope to encourage innovation among students and educators in schools. We also aim to change the existing, stringently focused standardized examinations in education, perhaps by substituting creative tests "said Haiying Long, the study's lead author and an associate professor of educational psychology. However, in order to accomplish these goals, we first need a deeper understanding of the condition of creativity assessments in education during the previous ten years, as well as what has been done and what still needs to be done.

The research was published in the journal Review of Research in Education with co-authors Barbara Kerr, Williamson Family Distinguished Professor of Counseling Psychology, Trina Emler, and Max Birdnow, PhD students in educational leadership and policy studies, both from the University of Kansas.

The analysis also revealed that research on creativity tests frequently includes both educational and psychological tests in equal measure. College education receives more attention from those in the education field than K–12 education does, whereas psychology undergraduates make up the vast majority of study subjects in this field. The authors noted that this could be problematic because the majority of those pupils are white and female, which means they do not provide a comprehensive view of how the tests interact with diverse groups.

Additionally, the studies are becoming more global. Although that development is positive, the United States still dominates the market. Because of this, Long said, some students receive no creative evaluations while others take tests that were established in the United States but frequently do not accurately reflect other languages and cultures.

Tests of creative or divergent thinking are the most popular of three main ways to measuring creativity. The tests have been demonstrated to be accurate and trustworthy in evaluating students' capacity for divergent thought, but frequently they just test for intelligence or concentrate only on one aspect of creativity, such as its cognitive, emotional, or conative components. Both self-report surveys and product-based assessments had variable degrees of this issue. While new methods of measuring creativity are emerging, most research is still concentrated on the widely used methods from the last several decades, according to the analysis.

All of these methods have been applied in the field for a very long period, according to Long. "The review demonstrates how little the area is evolving despite the existence of new tests or scales concentrating on other dimensions of creativity, such as creative potential, creative self-efficacy, and creativity in various domains. It is challenging to improve a field if you don't want to change it."

The studies on creativity assessment are frequently conducted solely with white students in the United States and are perhaps the most alarming because they frequently lack data on the racial or ethnic compositions of students in international subjects. According to the authors, this prevents further investigation into who is and is not tested and whether there are any equality concerns. Also infrequently discussed are the effects of gender socialization on girls' creativity in K–12 schooling as well as concerns of privilege and socioeconomic inequity, such as how pupils in disadvantaged schools are evaluated.

In order to solve the problems with creativity assessments in education, the study's authors provide a number of recommendations. In a perfect world, all pupils would be tested in kindergarten for cognitive, personality, and motivational traits to create baselines for creative methods with reassessments at important points. They claimed that using numerous strategies to spot and encourage students to apply creativity across domains, as well as using tests that don't follow the conventional wisdom, will benefit students. The researchers do agree that there are obstacles in the way of achieving that aim, such as the need for greater lab-to-teacher communication of research findings. To address that, the authors suggested for increased teacher professional development in creativity as well as tight cooperation between creativity researchers and educators in schools utilizing a service model.

Long lauded her colleagues in the KU creativity research group, including her co-authors and eminent KU scholars Yong Zhao and Neal Kingston, who are working on novel approaches to assess creativity and ask deeper questions about who is assessed for creative potential, how creativity assessments can reform educational assessment more generally, improve students' creative educational experiences, and contribute to an equitable and democratizing education.

"We aim to find better approaches to recognize creative kids in order to bridge the knowledge gap between research and practice. When choosing students for gifted and talented programs, IQ tests are frequently used rather than assessments of creativity "Long spoke. "You won't choose a pupil for the programs if you don't believe they have high cognitive potential. This creativity test is employed by school districts to identify exceptional and talented students. It is viewed as only a byproduct of intelligence. However, addressing these issues does show promise for creativity assessments. They are capable of providing information that is more equitable than what they currently provide, and we want to advance the field and perform better."

By the University of Kansas