Developing and articulating a process to build and validate a measurement rubric for measuring creativity in physics in high schools

Abstract

High school teachers with some knowledge of creativity often have difficulty identifying the creativity of their students. As a result, teachers are unable to assess the effectiveness of their teaching in terms of creativity, and students’ creativity is not targeted and enhanced in their teaching. This study aims to develop a measurement rubric for creativity that describes, through performance standards, what students should know and can do in relation to creativity along a development continuum. A measurement rubric for creativity allows teachers to design assessment tasks that are appropriate to their teaching practice, and one where student responses can be used as evidence to locate students on a developmental continuum of creativity by referencing them to the predetermined performance standards.

This study follows the procedures proposed by Tognolini (2018) for constructing a measurement rubric to define the construct of creativity and its growth in students. Validity evidence for this draft generic measurement rubric for creativity was then collected for use in various disciplines primarily through three focus groups and two teacher development workshops mainly focusing on content and construct evidence. Qualitative content analysis of this commentary provided validity evidence for the use of the draft generic measurement rubric for creativity. The study found that participants in the focus group discussions and the teacher development workshops consensually agreed on the use of a generic measurement rubric for creativity in classroom assessment. The process of constructing a measurement rubric for creativity and its validation evidence provides new opportunities to focus on measuring student growth of creativity, and will likely generalise to other “21st century” constructs.