Progression in Creativity report

The Progression in Creativity: Developing New Forms of Assessment report has been published on the CCE website. Year 9 students at Tallis took part in one of the field trials in collaboration with The Centre for Real World Learning (CRL) led by Guy Claxton and Bill Lucas at The University of Winchester. The aim of the research was to establish the viability of creating an assessment framework for tracking the development of young people’s creativity in schools. Initially an assessment tool was established by the researchers (see above).

This tool comprised of 5 habits and 15 sub-habits of creativity:

1. Inquisitive (wondering and questioning, exploring and investigating, challenging assumptions)
2. Persistent (sticking with difficulty, daring to be different, tolerating uncertainty)
3. Imaginative (playing with possibilities, making connections, using intuition)
4. Collaborative (sharing the product, giving and sharing feedback, cooperating appropriately)
5. Disciplined (developing techniques, reflecting critically, crafting and improving)

Following two field trials the principal findings were that:

1. The concept of an assessment framework for creativity in schools is valid and relevant. There was a strong sense among teachers that our framework encompassed a learnable set of dispositions. There are strong grounds for now seeking to develop a more sophisticated prototype, of use to teachers and learners, to track the development of creativity in schools.
2. The framework should initially focus on the 5-14 age range, although some practitioners may find it useful with younger and older pupils.
3. The evidence suggests that the primary use of any assessment framework will be formative, supporting pupils to harness more of their creativity and helping teachers more effectively to cultivate creative dispositions in the young people they teach.

As the report indicates "measuring creativity, for teachers, would appear to be a fundamentally different task from measuring literacy or even assessing performance in the creative arts."

Recommendations for further development include from the team include:

• Maintaining the emphasis on the learnability of creativity;
• Development of training materials and ‘best practice’ resources for teachers;
• Incorporating the tool into schools’ reporting systems;
• Separation of the sub-habits back into three distinct sub-habits;
• Scrutinising language and selecting a clearly legible printed font;
• Developing best practice;
• Developing a more formative tool to point pupils to areas for development;
• Capturing ‘breadth’ more systematically in the tool;
• Developing a more systematic evidence collection process;
• Developing the tool for the virtual environment; and
• Trialling the tool with the ‘unconverted’.

Read the Report