Sternberg and Measuring Creativity
“Creativity,” Dr. Sternberg replied, when asked what addition to admission assessment he would recommend if he had to limit himself to just one. Coming from the SSATB 2012 Annual Meeting's keynote speaker, the former president of American Psychological Association, and arguably the world’s foremost scholar of - and experimental practitioner in - expanded admission assessment, this is compelling counsel for our Think Tank's work.
Using Sternberg as a framer and guide for the work of the Think Tank on the Future of Admission Assessment is a no-brainer, and our time with him in Chicago was enormously valuable. In this post, we’ll take a deeper dive into assessing creativity; in future posts we’ll look at other Sternberg recommendations and many other aspects of expanded assessment for admission.
Sternberg’s recommendation to prioritize creativity is both narrowly pragmatic and broadly idealistic.
Pragmatic, because his evidence indicates that adding creativity assessment to traditional cognitive analysis assessment is the single best way to improve the predictability of an admission assessment when we are seeking to predict the most common outcome: a student’s grade point average in the first year of enrollment after admission. Adding creativity and the other elements of the Yale “Rainbow Assessment” to the mix of what we assess also strengthens the diversity of the admission pool. As Sternberg writes in his 2010 book, College Admissions for the 21stCentury, “the bottom line is that the Rainbow Assessments decreased the ethnic group differences relative to conventional tests such as the SAT, even as they improved the prediction of future academic success."
Idealistic, because the result of placing a greater emphasis on creativity in determining whom we admit will result in enhancing this proficiency among our students and our graduates, thereby improving our schools' opportunities to prepare students to address the complex problems of the 21st century world. As Trilling and Fadel argue in their book, 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times:
"Many believe that our current Knowledge Age is quickly giving way to an Innovation Age, [prioritizing] the ability to solve problems in new ways, to invent new technologies, or create the next killer app, or even to discover new branches of knowledge and invent entirely new industries, [yet] traditional education’s focus on facts, memorization, basic skills, and test taking has not been good for the development of creativity and innovation."
Indeed, the argument can go full circle from pragmatism to idealism and back to pragmatism: by taking steps to enhance the creativity of their incoming students and, ultimately, their alumni, schools strengthen their long-term prospects for philanthropic advancement, because our creative graduates are likely to be among our most financially successful in the changing world of work that Tom Friedman and Daniel Pink frequently describe. Admission officials: adding creativity measurement is a great favor you can provide to your colleagues in the development office!
Some in our profession have a reluctance to measure creativity, but the pedagogical guru Grant Wiggins, author of Understanding by Design, disagrees. As he explains in a blog post entitled “On Assessing Creativity: Yes You Can and Yes You Should,”:
Some states are exploring assessment of creative thinking as part of the whole 21st century skills/entrepreneurship movement. I think it is a great idea, with a lot of potential for leveraging change. Now, of course, the naysayers are quick to say that you cannot measure creative thinking. This is silly: here is a rubric for doing so: Creative. We can and do measure anything: critical and creative thinking, wine quality, doctors, meals, athletic potential, etc.
What does this look like in practice? Sternberg’s Rainbow Project at Yale used both multiple choice test questions (“creative-verbal,” like analogies preceded by counterfactual premises; “creative-quantitative,” such as novel number operations; and “creative-figural”) and open-ended assessments, captioning cartoons or creating stories based on unusual titles like “The Octopus’ Sneakers” or picture collages. Sternberg’s subsequent project, the Kaleidoscope at Tufts, was structured quite differently as an optional, open-ended essay element on the Tufts-specific section of the Common Application, and though this approach didn’t provide as much predictive power in terms of GPA, “studies did reveal that high-scoring students on the Kaleidoscope tend to be more satisfied with their personal life [and] are more socially active.
Measuring creativity is often marked by complexity and anxiety about the methodology. At Tufts, teams of assessors developed comprehensive rubrics, worked on sample essays to develop their scoring skills, compared results, and argued until arriving at near-consensus on their approach. Essays were evaluated on how “original—novel and different from others— and compelling—well-crafted and adding value— they are, as well as how appropriately they accomplish the task at hand.
As the Think Tank continues its deliberations, we invite member schools to share their own practices or to begin experimenting on their own. If your admission assessments have included measuring the creativity of your applicants, consider making a comment in the area below this blog, discussing your experience or sending our committee a report of your process and its results.
Perhaps your school has a mission to prepare and graduate especially creative or innovative students: your admission office might be in a position to better serve this mission by enhancing and broadening your applicant evaluations, much as Sternberg did at Tufts. Consider piloting such a process this year or next. Helpfully, Sternberg shares many examples of the Tufts Kaleidoscope assessment questions in Admissions for the 21st Century, such as the following: “Use an 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper to create something. You can blueprint your future home, create new product, draw a cartoon strip, design a costume or a theatrical set, compose a score, or do something entirely different. Let your imagination wander."
Standardized testing for admission has barely budged in most of its parameters in decades; as Sternberg writes, we should be “alarmed that as a society, we are using tests of abilities and achievements that are literally the same as those devised a century ago.” But the future is now: in what we intend to be an open, transparent, and inclusive process, the Think Tank on the Future of Assessment is enthusiastically exploring and inventing what will be a new era in how applicants for admission are evaluated.
