Assessing creativity: interim presentation

In their report Emerging Good Practice in Prompting Creativity (2006) the HMIE suggested that teachers were often uncertain about the place of assessment of creative work in a context where new and different responses are valued and many outcomes or responses are possible. Norman Jackson in Assessing students’ creativity: synthesis of higher education teachers’ views (June 2005) reported that teachers valued creativity but did not know how to assess it. He went on to suggest that most teachers with appropriate support, guidance and cultural encouragement could and would assess creativity in students’ higher education learning.

This project aims to gather the views of three groups of professionals working within the expressive arts with the aim of identifying effective and innovative models of assessment of creativity. These models will be further explored and documented and used to develop case studies in the format of a teaching resource for application across the whole curriculum. The resource will be piloted and evaluated by the research and development team in collaboration with teachers and initial teacher education (ITE) providers.

The project will further develop the links between arts organisations, schools and ITE providers through data collection; shared analysis and evaluation; and through the development, application and dissemination of findings. In this way stronger partnerships will be established as recommended in Teaching Scotland’s Future (Donaldson 2010)