Measuring Creativity in Protracted Crises

• In Event: Soft Skills Measurement and Tool Development in East Africa

Proposal

Education interventions that seek to build children’s holistic skills development include creative skills (Zosh et al., 2017). PlayMatters is an education initiative that seeks to integrate Learning through Play teaching methods into existing education system to support children’s holistic skills development (cognitive, physical, social, emotional, and creative) and well-being for refugee and host community children in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda. To achieve these outcomes, PlayMatters sought a measure of creative skills development appropriate for humanitarian and low-resource contexts with little success.

Creativity is an elusive concept to define, ranging from inventiveness and aesthetics to ideation and problem-solving, making it difficult to measure (Parker & Thomsen, 2019; Guillford, 1950). Creativity can carry very different meanings depending on age and developmental stage of the child (Evans et al., 2021a). Additionally, sociocultural conceptions and influences of creativity are essential to consider, particularly in the contexts PlayMatters works in (Glăveanu et al., 2020). Moreover, some theorists argue that there are some foundational characteristics of creativity that are general across domains preceding domain-specific areas of creativity (Baer & Kaufman, 2005).

This paper highlights PlayMatters’ process of developing a measure of creative skills development and preliminary psychometric properties of the measure. These findings provide a promising approach to measuring creative skills development in a child-friendly and playful approach that recognizes the cultural and structural limitations in humanitarian and low-resource contexts.

The creativity tool includes several play-based activities – including verbal, movement, drawing/coloring, playdough, and shape manipulation – that measure creativity through fluency, flexibility, originality, technical aesthetic/curiosity, and overall creativity. The tool uses the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT), the golden standard in creativity research, to overcome the challenge of defining and contextualizing creativity. The CAT technique involves a team of experts looking at products created by the children and rating them in relation to one another on a scale of 1 to 5 on fluency, originality, technical aesthetic/curiosity, and overall creativity. This tool is currently being piloted and is the first of its kind to be used in a conflict, crisis, and emergency setting.

Authors

• Marlana Salmon-Letelier, IRC Teachers College

• Lauren Pisani, The Palladium Group

• Jonathan Kwok, International Rescue Committee