The National Research Council deems creativity to be a key skill for the 21st Century, but identifying just what creativity is is notoriously difficult, which in turn makes it difficult for educators to promote it. Research from the University of Kansas highlights how many of the methods of assessing creativity in young people today suffer from race, gender, and class biases.

The researchers examined eight journals that focus on creativity, education, and psychology, assessing their output between 2010 and 2021 in a bid to better understand the current state of creativity assessments. The results reveal that most testing today focuses on a combination of self-report questionnaires, divergent thinking tests, and subjective techniques and rating scales.

“There are a lot of conversations about how much improvement that creativity research in education needs. We want to promote creativity with schools and students through assessments that can be applied in classrooms. We also want to reform the current high-stakes, narrowly focused standardized tests in education—maybe by using creativity assessments as an alternative,” the researchers explain. “But before we are able to achieve these purposes, we want to have a better idea of the state of creativity assessments in education over the last decade and understand what has been done and what needs to be done.”

A mixed bag

The way we assess creativity seems to be pretty evenly split between psychological and educational assessments. Perhaps unsurprisingly, educational assessments are most common in educational settings, with psychological assessments commonplace in research environments.

This is potentially problematic, as research participants tend to be quite homogenous, so may not accurately reflect the wider population. Creativity assessments also seem to fall into three key approaches, with the most common being the divergent thinking test. These tests are generally seen as reliable in testing one’s divergent thinking abilities, they tend to focus purely on intelligence or on a single aspect of creativity, such as cognitive or emotional.

“All of these approaches have been used in the field for a long time,” the authors explain. “There are new tests or scales focusing on other aspects of creativity, such as creative potential, creative self-efficacy, creativity in different domains, but the review shows just how much the field is not changing. If you don’t want to change the field, it is hard to improve it.”

Lack of diversity

Perhaps the most worrying finding, however, is that most studies on creativity assessments are conducted with white students, so there is a distinct lack of information on either the racial or ethnic compositions of students, especially in international studies. This prevents a more thorough understanding of who is assessed and whether there are any equality and equity issues present.

The researchers argue that for things to improve, it would be wise to use a number of approaches to help identify and then encourage students to utilize creativity across a range of domains. It would also benefit students if a broader range of assessments than the traditionally dominant approaches were used.

“We want to fill the gap between research and practice with better ways to identify creative students. When students are selected for gifted and talented programs, it is widely based on intelligence and seldom on creativity tests,” the researchers conclude. “If you don’t think a student has high intelligence ability, they won’t be selected for the programs. In school districts, that creativity assessment is used to identify gifted and talented students. It is considered simply a side effect of intelligence. At the same time, we do see promise for creativity assessments in addressing these questions. They can provide more equitable information than they currently do, and we want to push the field forward and do better.”