Does Assessment Kill Student Creativity?

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No, assessment should not kill student creativity. It should serve as a guideline to foster specific creativity.

 

“Creativity is the interaction among aptitude, process, and environment by which an individual or group produces a perceptible product that is both novel and useful as defined within a social context.” (Beghetto, 2005, p. 255)

 

Posting best work may deviate the openness or creativity. (Beghetto, 2005, p. 257)

 

Coming from a design undergraduate study, I wholeheartedly agree with this article. My instructors have always critiqued everyone’s work while highlighting the ones that he or she thinks is the “path” we should innovate towards. While this does stifle some innovation, the article seems to concur that this is an acceptable method to guide students toward the appropriate social context in which the assignment was designed for. In interactive arts and technology, not only do we design projects that are novel and functional but also aesthetically pleasing. That was something that I thought I can add toward my own teaching when I assess projects during reading, but on second thought… elementary students probably have no prior knowledge whatsoever on visual art or spatial design. Maybe I can save that for a higher grade or scaffold them beforehand. Overall I agree that by only highlighting the best works, it adds unnecessary stress to students not highlighted and is frustrating because from past experience it means I have to work through a different mindset or ideas I am unfamiliar with. Creativity is about the uniqueness of an idea, it is nothing unique when we have 30 of the same project handed in. I took note that although we should promote creativity in our classrooms, it can also be seen as disruptive. Creativity usually means a deviation from the intended lesson plan and its outcome. In order to support creativity, teachers will have to put in more time and effort to cater to unique assessments that may or may not be supported realistically due to time constraints. Perhaps creativity should be promoted in Art, Science, English and others while others like Math will be more structured and creativity will be discouraged? I am going to stick with my initial reaction to the title. Though in the back of my head I feel the skill mastery being the objective ultimately is a better way of teaching knowledge, even though I am not sure if this is widely supported by the curriculum.

Reference

Beghetto, R. A. (2005, September). Does assessment kill student creativity?. In The Educational Forum (Vol. 69, No. 3, pp. 254-263). Taylor & Francis Group.

Blogging and internet projects in the classroom

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The article Collaborative Literacy: Blogs and Internet Projects explains why using a blog as a delivery method in a classroom helps student be more creative and be able to share their thoughts more easily. My initial thoughts into my inquiry question already knew that blogs afforded for students to use multimedia to respond to questions be it in video, audio, image and a lot of other forms. What this article introduced to me about blogging was the idea of using an avatar (with primary students) to interact with the students. The article mentioned a teacher role playing as “Jefferson the teddy bear” to ask the class questions such as “How can we save my endangered species friends the eagles?” The teacher would provide the resource links and off the students went to research and respond and comment each other’s findings.

I thought that this article helps highlight the SAMR model’s modification and redefinition of blogging technology in a classroom. The fact that students can now hand in videos or audio recording of themselves with a written assignment is really close to redefinition using technology. The article gave examples of full redefinition of technology when students would record their poems and send it to another teacher who runs an internet podcast called “Youth Radio”. Students’ recording now is shared on the internet, giving students a voice and become content creators for a much larger audience (Anyone around the world really!).

Reference:

Boling, E., Erica Boling, Jill Castek, Lisa Zawilinski, & Karen Barton. (03/01/2008). The reading teacher: Collaborative literacy: Blogs and internet projects International Reading Association.