ASSESSMENT OF CREATIVITY
ASHOK KUMAR.B. SURAPURAsst. Professor
Department of school of education B.Ed. Section Karnataka State Women's University,
Jnanashakti Campus, Athani Road, Bijapur.
Abstract:
Creativity has been studied from a variety of perspectives and is important in
numerous contexts. Most of these approaches are unidisciplinary, and it is therefore
difficulty to form a coherent overall view. The following sections examine some of the
areas in which creativity is seen as being important.”
There is very little on the recording and assessing of creativity in the literature
although in the field of psychometrics, creativity tests were historically used, for example
those developed by Torrance. Torrance described four components by which individual
creativity could be assessed.
Creativity , Assessment , Perspectives , Resolution , Synthesis , Psychometric.
INTRODUCTION
Fluency: the ability to produce a large number of ideas.
Flexibility: the ability to produce a large variety of ideas
Elaboration: the ability to develop , embellish, or fill out an idea
Originality: the ability to produce ideas that are unusual, stastically infrequent, not banal or obvious.
More recently, however, teachers have preferred to use a variety of means to assess creativity, by
monitoring pupuils'work, behaviour and what they say.
Some attempts have been made to identify the criteria relevant to the assessment of creativity. For
example, Besemer and Treffinger(1981) group these intro:
Novelty- how new the product is in terms of techniques, processes, concepts: the capacity of a product to
spark further creative products inspired by it: the potential of product to 'transform' or create a radical shift
in approach
Resolution-the extent to which a product meets need, or resolves a situation
Synthesis- the extent to which a product combines elements which are unlike, into a coherent whole.
Synthesis thus encompasses criteria such as complexity, elegance, attractiveness, expressiveness,
completeness and the quality of its crafting.
Jackson and messick-1965 and kneller-1965 propose 'relevance' or 'appropriateness' as an
additional and essential area of criteria. It could be argued that this set of criteria is implicit in the three
groups of Besemer and Treffinger, as it would be difficult to imagine how a product could be novel without
also being appropriate or relevant.
However. As fryer notes, when considering the creativity of school pupils, there are some
problems with such taxonomies of criteria. For example, how is novelty to be understood in the context of
school pupils? In Fryewr's study of 1000 teachers, many suggested they preferred judging Pupils work
against each individuals past performance. Thus something might be deemed to be original for a particular
pupil.
Another area of difficulty concerns how comprehensive all criteria for assessing creativity must
be. Work which succeeded in satisfying all or most of the criteria would be a very high standard, with a
potential for damaging pupil self-esteem. Fryewr recommends that in the case of school pupils creativity,
much less stringent criteria are required, and that self- assessment should be encouraged. Craft (2000),
following the same line of less stringent criteria, nevertheless leaves assessment in the hands of the teacher,
suggesting that the observation and recording by the teacher of the behaviour of young children is
particularly significant, as this highlights what is then novel for the individual child as meaning maker.
Afurther area of difficulty highlighted by Fryer's study concerns teachers, interms of the approach
which they bring to the definition of creativity as a whole. For example, there are gender difference: female
teachers seem to value the personnel sides of creativity more than male teachers who place higher value on
the elegance of an outcome, and this effects their judgments of pupils creativity. This finding was borne out
by stoycheyva's work. In addition, the teacher's subject area has an impact on their confidence as an
assessor, for it seems that staff teaching art and design feel most confident about assessing creativity and
other teachers are much less so. Stoycheva found that primary teachers were found to be reluctant to
nominate children of either gender as non-original.
Turning finally to the wider context for assessing and recording creativity, there is a case for
examining the relationship between fostering creativity and the bureaucratic arrangements for the quality
assurance of teaching and learning, including subject-centered level grading of achievements of both
teachers and pupils. Some have used empirical studies to argue that such arrangements have led to the
diminution of creativity in education-Jeffrey and woods, 1998
MEASURING CREATIVITY:
Several attempts have been made to develop a CREATIVITY QUOTIENT IOF AN
INDIVIDUAL SIMILAR TO THE INTELLIGENCE QUOTIENT (IQ), however these have been
unsuccessful. Most measures of creativity are dependent on the personal judgment of the tester, so a
standardized measure is difficult to develop.
1) Psychometric approach:
J.P.Guilfords group, developed the Torrance tests of creative thinking. They involved simple tests
of divergent thinking and other problem-solving skills, which were scored on:
Fluency. The total number of interpretable, meaningful and relevant ideas generated in response to the
stimulus.
Flexibility. The number of different categories of relevant responses
Originality: The statistical rarity of the responses among the test subjects.
Elaboration: The amount of detail in the responses.
1)Social-personality approach
Some researchers have taken a social –personality approach to the measurement of the creativity. In these
studies, personality traits such as independence of judgments, self- confidence, and attraction to
complexity, aesthetic orientation and risk-taking are used as measures of the creativity of individuals.
2)Negative approach:
Anegative approach to measuring creativity may involve measuring what was missing in a preplanned task
or environment and what was previously known by the subject of observation. This is essentially measuring
what is considered 'not creative' on order to determine what is creative. The amount of creativity from the
subject is the amount of adaptation or improvisation that was conceptualized (during the task, in the
environment) without clues or hints from that procedure or environment.
Fostering creativity:
Danieal pinmk, in his 2005 book Awhole new mind, repeating arguments posed through the 20th
century, argues that we are entering a new age where creativity is becoming increasingly important. In this
conceptual age, we will need to foster and encourage right-directed thinking (representing creativity and
emotion) over left-directed thinking (representing logical. Analytical thought).
Nickerson provides a summary of the various creativity techniques that have been posed. These
include approaches that have been abolishing purpose and intention
DEVELOPED BYTHE BOTH ACADEMIAAND INDUSTRY:
1)Establishing purpose and intention
2)Building basic skills
3)Encouraging acquisitions of domain-specific knowledge
4)Stimulating and rewarding curiosity and exploration
5)building motivation, especially internal ,motivation
6)Encouraging confidence and a willingness to take risks
7)Focusing on mastery and self – competition
8)Promoting supportable beliefs about creativity
9)Providing opportunities for choice discovery
10)Developing self-management(METACOGNITINVE SKILLS)
11)teaching techniques and strategies for facilitating creative performance
12)Providing balance
ENHANCING THE CREATIVE PROCESS WITH NEWTECHNOILOGIES
Exploring how to enhance the creative process with new information and communication
Technologies(ICT) is a growing field of research.
The research work includes:
ARIZ( the Algorithm of Inventive Problem-solving), both developed by the Russian scientist Gerich
Altshuller: and
Computer-Aided Morphological analysis (presented at Swedish Morphological Society).
CONCLUSION:
There is a significant amount of research and literature into the nature of creativity, there is
relatively little research into the development and assessment of pupils 'creativity. There are also important
areas unresolved, such as whether being creative in one subject/ domain can be transferred to another
subject/domain.
What is clear is that there are a number of different aspects that need to be clarified if pupils'
creativity is to be promoted. These aspects include outcome, the pupil, the process, the strategies used by
the teacher, and the social contexts in which the activity takes place. For example, it has been suggested that
early family opportunities for independent action encourage creative achievement and that creativity
training programmes in schools are more effective when teacher involvement is high. Individual creativity
may be affected by even very minor aspects of the immediate social environment. For example, creativity
may be impeded where there is undue time pressure, over-supervision, competition, or where choices are
restricted and evaluation is expected.
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