TITLE:
Assessing Creative Skills
AUTHORS:
Natalie Foster, Andreas Schleicher
KEYWORDS:
Assessment, Creative Thinking, Evidence-Centred Design, Cross-Cultural Ap-proach, Validity, Comparability
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.13 No.1,
January
13,
2022
ABSTRACT: Creativity or creative thinking are often viewed as intangibles that we can observe in their impact and consequences, but that in itself is hard to define and assess. Some would even argue that assessments, which generally look for the capacity of students to find and refine pre-defined answers, stand in direct opposition to efforts to strengthen creativity. However, what we cannot see is hard to improve and what we cannot measure will not get attention. For this reason, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is making efforts to build a novel assessment that can capture elements of creative thinking. The approach is based on evidence-centred design which involves documented, explicit linkages among the test purposes, the assumptions made about the test takers and that the test seeks to measure among them, and the evidence supporting the claims. This paper summarises the rationale and design of this assessment.