Authors: Ellen Spencer, Bill Lucas and Guy Claxton
Institution: Centre for Real World Learning, University of Winchester
Full reference: Spencer, E., Lucas, B. and Claxton, G. (2012). Progression in Creativity: developing new forms of assessment – Final Research Report. Newcastle: CCE
In Spring 2011, Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE) commissioned the Centre for Real-World Learning (CRL) at The University of Winchester to undertake research to establish the viability of creating an assessment framework for tracking the development of young people’s creativity in schools.
After reviewing the literature on creativity and its assessment, and consulting expert practitioners, CRL created a framework for developing creativity in schools, and derived an assessment tool to trial in schools.
This tool comprised of 5 habits and 15 sub-habits of creativity:
Through two separate field trials the research suggested that the framework was sufficiently distinct from existing approaches to creativity to be useful and that from a teacher point of view, the framework was both rigorous and plausible.
The principal findings were that:
In the process of validation with experts, creative practitioners and teachers, a number of other important issues were raised. Most notable of these was a strong sense of reluctance by teachers to make summative judgments about the level of creativity in their pupils, and the researchers found no appetite among teachers for a paper-and-pencil, summative creativity instrument in schools. Measuring creativity, for teachers, would appear to be a fundamentally different task from measuring literacy or even assessing performance in the creative arts. The researchers address this and other issues in this report.
As a result of this work, it is the firmly held belief of the CRL research team that the refining of a formative assessment tool to assist pupils in the pursuit of ‘growing’ their creativity could be of great value. The next step would seem to be the development of a more sophisticated prototype. While this study demonstrated effectively a ‘proof of concept’, for the tool to be formatively useful across the age ranges, there is more research to be done concerning effective styles of moderation and of the development of more effective criteria to chart progression.
Recommendations for further development include:
Research and development work for this project ran from the summer term of the academic year 2010/11 and culminated in a final analysis of data in the spring term of 2011/12.
The research and development work with teachers in this project was a ‘proof of concept’ activity guided by three overarching questions:
Five phases of the research:
Literature review summarised in section 2 of the report (the full version is available as part of the CCE Literature Review Series)