As students leave school and begin contributing to society in their professional and personal lives, they’ll need to find new ways to resolve 21st-century challenges. Creativity is the key to this.
School districts have accordingly placed greater emphasis on teaching and measuring creative skills in recent years. Yet, as many educators consider online formats, they worry that digital assessments will be too rigid to properly measure the creative process. Similarly, administrators often worry that assessing creativity will be too time- and resource-intensive.
However, modern EdTech platforms now offer tools that not only assess higher-order creative skills but also stimulate them using innovative multimedia and gamified formats—and with greater efficiency than before.
In this article, we look at practical ways to assess creativity using online test tools so that educators and administrators can challenge students to think outside of the box.
Creativity is an essential skill, and digital tools provide new opportunities to assess it. This section outlines practical strategies for assessing student performance with online assessment tools.
Open-ended responses provide a straightforward way to evaluate creativity in digital assessments. By allowing students to respond freely to prompts, educators can gauge their ability to think critically and generate original ideas.
For example, a prompt like “Was Charlemagne more holy or more barbaric?” allows students to demonstrate analytical skills and creative thinking. To ensure fair assessment, use a rubric to guide scoring. TAO’s platform enables custom rubrics and automated feedback, streamlining the evaluation process while maintaining flexibility.
Practical Tip: In science and geography courses, encourage students to support their ideas with visuals such as infographics or diagrams, which can be uploaded directly into digital platforms like TAO. This adds depth to their responses and offers an additional opportunity to assess their visual creativity.
Multimedia projects are an excellent way to assess creativity because they allow students to combine various forms of expression. Videos, podcasts, and digital art can all serve as platforms for students to showcase their innovative thinking.
For instance, students could explain a scientific concept by creating a video using AI animation or a podcast that incorporates interviews, sound design, and narrative storytelling. TAO’s system supports multimedia submissions, making it easy for educators to review and grade creative work across different media types.
Practical Tip: Use structured project outlines that include checkpoints where students submit drafts or prototypes for feedback. This iterative process fosters creative skills like adaptability by encouraging revision and improvement based on instructor guidance.
Unlike traditional assessments, authentic assessments model real-world situations to both teach and measure higher-order skills like creative problem-solving. Often, these assessments take an interdisciplinary approach to integrate knowledge from multiple subject areas.
For example, economics students might be challenged to pitch a business idea in a way that demonstrates the difference between accounting profit and economic profit. This task gives them the opportunity to apply their knowledge and get more comfortable presenting in front of their peers. TAO can facilitate presentations by enabling video calls, slideshow presentations, and rubrics for peer assessment.
Practical Tip: Introduce interactive peer evaluation as part of the grading process, allowing students to assess each other’s work. A 2021 research report found that this can significantly improve creativity by giving students a chance to incorporate critical feedback into their thinking process. Interestingly, studies suggest that peer feedback is even more beneficial online than in traditional settings, due to the increased flexibility and interactivity of the feedback medium.
Gamification engages students in creative thinking by turning assessments into interactive, problem-solving experiences, much like board or video games. Games and simulations that require students to take innovative approaches in order to advance can effectively measure creativity in a dynamic way.
In online assessments, gamification often comes in the form of portable custom interactions (PCIs) that you can integrate with your system. An example might be a business simulation where students must make decisions about product development, marketing, and customer engagement.
Platforms like TAO also support interactive tasks involving branching logic. This allows for adaptive scenarios where students’ choices lead to different outcomes, revealing their creative decision-making processes.
Gamification does have its limits, however. Researchers Kornell and Terrace have found that games incorporating hints will engage students and make it seem like they are progressing. However, in a real-world setting without hints, they could fail to recall crucial information. To avoid this “knowledge mirage,” games must accurately reflect the challenges students face in the real world.
Practical Tip: Use scoring systems that reward risk-taking and innovation. This encourages students to experiment and think outside the box—both crucial aspects of creative thinking. In TAO, you can attach digital rubrics to ensure that scorers recognize risk-taking as they grade.
Adaptive learning technologies make it possible to personalize assessments to fit individual student needs, helping measure creativity at various levels of skill and ability. These systems adjust task difficulty based on student performance, offering increasingly challenging questions to measure higher levels of creative thinking. Conversely, adaptive assessments can also reduce difficulty for students who struggle to answer more complex questions.
For instance, in a math-based creativity test, if a student excels in solving basic problems creatively, the system can automatically generate more complex scenarios that demand higher-order thinking. That way, geometry students who grasp the fundamentals might be asked, “Explain what would happen if you drew geometric shapes on a globe?” Meanwhile, some of their classmates might be presented with simpler algebra questions.
Practical Tip: Incorporate multiple creative pathways into adaptive assessments, allowing students to choose different methods for approaching a problem. This not only personalizes learning but also encourages creative expression.
Digital portfolios offer a comprehensive view of a student’s creative development by allowing them to showcase a range of work over time. These portfolios can include written essays, multimedia projects, and other artifacts that demonstrate creative thinking and expression across disciplines.
By allowing students to upload and curate their projects, platforms like TAO enable educators to assess creativity across different submissions, offering insight into how a student’s ideas evolve. Portfolios can also be used to highlight specific creative strengths or areas for improvement.
Practical Tip: Encourage students to reflect on their creative process for each project they include in their portfolio. This can be done through written commentary or video reflections, providing deeper insights into their creative thinking.
Analytics can help educators measure creativity. Many platforms, including TAO, offer PCIs and other test-taker tools like notepads that provide insight into a student’s interaction with the assessment questions. This data can reveal patterns in creative behavior, such as how long students spend brainstorming, or the diversity of their approaches to different test questions. Analytics can help educators understand student performance and adjust assessments to encourage even greater levels of reflection and innovation.
Practical Tip: The data gained from online assessments isn’t just valuable in targeting individual interventions. Administrators can also use it to evaluate item performance and spot school- and district-wide trends. This information can then inform decisions on curriculum and resource allocation for upcoming semesters.
Collaborative tasks offer a way to assess creative skills such as brainstorming, problem-solving, adaptation, and critical thinking. Some digital platforms can simulate real-world challenges that allow students to demonstrate these abilities.
In the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s EcoMUVE curriculum, for instance, students are presented with 3-D versions of ecological settings. They must collaborate to collect information and apply their knowledge of biology or ecology to emerging problems.
Practical Tip: Be sure to monitor group assignments to ensure that each individual is contributing. If students use collaborative assignments as an excuse to check out, it can have negative effects on morale and engagement for the whole group. Using the analytics from a platform like TAO, educators can ensure that students are actively participating in solution development.
As parents and school systems put more emphasis on creativity and critical thinking, educators are finding new strategies for measuring student performance on these real-world skills. By incorporating multimedia, challenging students with authentic assessments, and using data and analytics to inform instructional changes and resource allocation, teachers can effectively measure creativity in online assessments.
To learn more about how TAO can empower educators to teach and assess creativity, take a look at these helpful resources:
Creativity can be assessed in many ways, including open-ended responses, multimedia projects, collaborative problem-solving tasks, and gamified assessments.
Platforms like TAO provide customizable assessments, multimedia submission options, and real-time feedback to support educators, students, and other stakeholders.
Adaptive learning adjusts task difficulty based on student performance, offering personalized challenges that encourage creative problem-solving without overwhelming the learner.