Creative potential: assessment issues and the EPoC Battery / Potencial creativo: temas de evaluación y batería EPoC

Creativity, Critical Thinking, Communication, and Collaboration: Assessment, Certification, and Promotion of 21st Century Skills for the Future of Work and Education

This article addresses educational challenges posed by the future of work, examining “21st century skills”, their conception, assessment, and valorization. It focuses in particular on key soft skill competencies known as the “4Cs”: creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication. In a section on each C, we provide an overview of assessment at the level of individual performance, before focusing on the less common assessment of systemic support for the development of the 4Cs that can be measured at the institutional level (i.e., in schools, universities, professional training programs, etc.). We then present the process of official assessment and certification known as “labelization”, suggesting it as a solution both for establishing a publicly trusted assessment of the 4Cs and for promoting their cultural valorization. Next, two variations of the “International Institute for Competency Development’s 21st Century Skills Framework” are presented. The first of these comprehensive systems allows for the assessment and labelization of the extent to which development of the 4Cs is supported by a formal educational program or institution. The second assesses informal educational or training experiences, such as playing a game. We discuss the overlap between the 4Cs and the challenges of teaching and institutionalizing them, both of which may be assisted by adopting a dynamic interactionist model of the 4Cs—playfully entitled “Crea-Critical-Collab-ication”—for pedagogical and policy-promotion purposes. We conclude by briefly discussing opportunities presented by future research and new technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

Dynamic Assessment of Creativity for Diagnostic Purposes

Abstract. The present paper aims to propose the dynamic assessment of creativity for diagnostic purposes, which combines the sociocultural approach to creativity with the findings of creative cognition research. A traditional theorization viewed creativity mainly as an ability of individuals and its expression depending on the extent to which their environment allows and supports it. According to the individualistic approach of creativity, static testing has been its predominant psychological assessment. However, the traditional approach to creativity has been criticized from a sociocultural theoretical perspective that regards creativity as distributed cognition between the mind and culture in recent years. Based on sociocultural theory, dynamic assessment of creativity is an alternative process to static testing for assessing creative potential. Besides testing, in dynamic assessment, the cognitive strategies of creativity that creative cognition research has revealed are mediated in children as symbolic tools or signs. Therefore, in dynamic assessment, sociocultural theory is combined with creative cognition. In the present paper, initially, we present the relevant theory and research on dynamic assessment and creative cognition. Next, studies applying dynamic assessment to children of different ages and devising the mediation protocol will be discussed. Finally, we will consider the psychological and educational implications of dynamic assessment of children’s creativity.

Teaching With Picture Books on Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students'Creativity

Studies have shown that teaching with picture books can help improve creativity development of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students. A quasi-experimental research design was applied in this study. Deaf and hard-of-hearing students in grades 3-6 from two cities, B and T, were selected as the samples in a pilot study. The Evaluation of Potential Creativity (EPoC) test tool (Ver. A) was applied to measure creativity through student performance on individual tests of divergent and integrative thinking. Following thirty 40-min lessons over 10 weeks, the EPoC test tool (Ver. B) was used to measure student creativity in the experimental and control groups. The results showed the following: (1) the performance of DHH students was better on graphic divergence than on verbal divergence, (2) performance on the divergent dimensions of creativity was significantly higher for DHH students from the experimental group than the control group, and (3) there was no difference in integrative thinking between the two groups in the posttest. In practice, teachers could use picture books in their lesson plans to improve the creativity of DHH students that results from divergent thinking. Future research should focus on the development of creativity in DHH students through integrative thinking with a longer teaching intervention.