Assessing creative productivity

ABSTRACT

This research investigated the potential for curricula at the intersection of the arts and the sciences to develop creative productivity of students. The purpose of this research was to develop a series of rubric assessments to evaluate the content and creative and higher order thinking on a variety of teacher-made lesson plans and student-made products. The research used an iterative process to identify the criteria for the rubrics. The content validity process involved the use of experts in the domains of art and science education, assessment, and creativity to identify important themes from the research base of each domain. Then the process continued to teachers of cross-curricular lesson plans, to provide insights into usefulness of the constructs in practical contexts. The final instrument was used to evaluate cross-disciplinary student products. These works of art were evaluated by a sample of art teachers with over 5 years of experience. The art teachers had attended professional development offered by the Innovation Collaborative evaluator on arts integration and the rubric. The resulting inter-rater reliability estimates ranged from moderate to excellent, for each of the four rubrics. The resulting rubrics can be used to assess work in research or classroom environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Creativity
• assessment
• rubric
• arts integration
• content validation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Notes on contributors

Hope E. Wilson

Hope E. Wilson is an associate professor of education at the University of North Florida where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in assessment, educational psychology, and statistics. She graduated with a PhD in Gifted Education from the University of Connecticut. Her research focusing on early childhood giftedness has been published in Gifted Child Quarterly, Journal of Advanced Academics, Journal for the Education of the Gifted, and Roeper Review, and she is the co-author along with Jill Adelson of the book Letting Go of Perfect: Overcoming Perfectionism in Kids (Prufrock Press, 2009). She was the 2017 Early Leader Award recipient for the National Association for Gifted Children. She is an associate editor for the Journal of Advanced Academics, and chair of the Research and Evaluation Network for the National Association for Gifted Children. She is a founding board member of the Innovation Collaborative, a non-profit organization working at the intersections of the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities.

Lucinda Presley

Lucinda Presley has worked at the STEAM intersections for over 25 years. She is Chair and Executive Director of the Washington, DC-based Innovation Collaborative, a coalition of national arts, STEM, humanities and higher education institutions that is researching STEAM effective practices. As Executive Director of ICEE Success Foundation, she also works with partners in Texas, nationally and internationally, developing K-12 programming, writing curriculum, and training teachers. She also has led STEAM education initiatives and teacher/artist training for a science museum, an art museum, and a national art provider. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Interdisciplinary Studies.