Creativity

• In Event: 31.044 - MakEval: Mixed Methods Approaches to Evaluating Making in Schools

Abstract

Creativity is generally defined as “the interaction among aptitude, process, and environment by which an individual or group produces a perceptible product that is both novel and useful as defined within a social context” (Plucker, Beghetto, & Dow, 2004, p. 90). Thus, the connection to making and makerspaces is obvious. There is a widely held belief among researchers that everyone can be creative (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009). However, creativity assessment which is typically grouped into four different types-creative processes, creative persons, creative products, and creative environments, still needs to be further studied, especially within the making contexts. We are focusing our efforts on evaluating the creative process, creative environments and creative products as we feel these strands are most salient for making with youth.
Existing measures of creative processes are often limited to divergent thinking tests (Authors, 2017). Although the resulting scores –fluency (the number of responses to stimuli), originality (the uniqueness of responses to stimuli), and flexibility (the number of categories of responses to stimuli) help quantify students’ creative potential, they do not directly measure creative processes involved in the actual making of products. Hence, we have been working to develop an instrument that targets the creative process through observing and interviewing students who participate in various making programs.
Additionally, the Consensual Assessment Technique (Amabile, 1982) that features the use of expert judges to evaluate a product’s creativity still remains the most popular method for assessing creative products (Authors, In press). Yet, evidence of reliability and validity is mixed. In particular, some researchers (e.g., Runco & Chand, 1994) have argued that expert opinions may not be more valid than self-ratings or peer and teacher evaluations, and students know whether they are creative (Authors, In press). Given the expenses and difficulty associated with finding expert raters in various domains, we aim to investigate the effectiveness of self-ratings, peer evaluations and teacher ratings by asking students, their peers, and teachers to choose the two most creative products that a student has made at the end of a making program, and then rate them on a 1 (not creative at all) to 10 (extremely creative) Likert scale. Correlations among self-ratings, peer ratings, and teacher ratings will provide valuable information regarding the potential effectiveness of these techniques in assessing creative products.
Since creativity involves the interaction among aptitude, process and environment, lots of efforts have also been devoted to measuring creative environment. For instance, Amabile, Conti, Coon, Lazenby, and Herron (1996) developed the KEYS: Assessing the Climate for Creativity instrument. This widely used instrument examines employees’ perceptions of their work environment that may influence creative work. However, little has been understood regarding the creative environment within making contexts. Therefore, we developed an instrument that examines students’ perceptions of various aspects of their making programs such as resources and evaluation systems. We adapted most of the items from KEYS (Amabile et al., 1996), but also included items that pertain to the unique features of making programs.

Author

• Meihua Qian, Clemson University