Designing a ‘creativity and assessment scale’ for arts education

Abstract

Having accurate insights of teachers’ conceptions of creativity and the role of assessment in arts education would inform education policy, training programmes and the measurement of learning outcomes. Yet no study has been found to examine the relationship between teachers’ conceptions of creativity and their conceptions of assessment in arts education. Additionally, there is no suitable instrument found that has been designed for measuring the interactions between teachers’ conceptions of creativity and their conceptions of assessment practice in arts education. The study has successfully developed and validated an instrument for use in arts education with satisfactory psychometric properties and sensitivity to respondents’ gender and major area of study. It has enabled the study to obtain useful findings that illustrate the importance of studying the conceptions of creativity and assessment practices, and discussed key issues raised in four areas: conceptions held vs. practice realities; giftedness and talent in the arts; skills development and the creative environment; and creativity and assessment. These could provide important insights for pedagogy development, teacher evaluation, as well as decision and policy-making in educational reform, teacher education, professional development and research.

Keywords:

• creativity
• arts assessment
• Rasch measurement

Acknowledgement

The work described in this paper was supported by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong SAR under the GRF Project No. 840608. Special thanks to Professor Wen-Chung Wang for his valuable advice. Thanks also to the editor Prof Ying-Yao Cheng and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.