The document discusses various methods for assessing creativity in students. It describes divergent thinking tests like the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT), which assess creative attitudes, thinking, and problem-solving skills. An experiment is described where participants scored an average of 7.4% higher on the TTCT during a session with 10Hz transcranial alternating current stimulation of the frontal cortex compared to a control session. This suggests alpha brain activity is involved in creativity. Performance-based assessments that measure applying skills and knowledge are also discussed, like essays, labs, and portfolios. References on creativity assessment theories and methods are provided.

1. PD Plan Presentation
for Faculty of
Nurturing Creativity in
your Students
Prepared by Latifa Rahman
Bidita

2. Why Should Creativity
be Nurtured?
• Nurturing creativity involves providing opportunities for
children to problem solve, think “outside the box”,
brainstorm, discover through trial and error. In a
classroom that inspires creative thinking, teachers and
children learn to be comfortable taking risks and making
mistakes, both of which are an important part of learning,
discovering new ideas, and refining the process of
creating.
• It gives them the opportunity to create something tangible
from personal feelings and experiences—a beautiful
reflection of their unique imaginations. It's also the
perfect activity to nurture their emotional health and
ensure the enhancement of their lives as a well-rounded
individual.

3. Reasons that the
assessment method is
critical for nurturing
creativity
• In the educational context,
assessment of creativity is mostly
about recognizing creativity and
creating ideal conditions to nurture
it, not about categorizing the
students as “creative” or “not
creative”.
• Assessment is made difficult by
many things, not the least of which
are disagreements about the nature
of creativity. One of the most
fundamental questions in creativity
theory and research is the issue of
domain specificity.

4. Why assessment method critical in nurturing
creativity? Continue.
• Are the skills, talents, personality characteristics, ways of thinking, and other
determinants of creative performance general-purpose traits of creative
performance general-purpose traits that a person possessing them can bring to bear
on any kind of task? .
• Can one’s creativity as a composer of music help her produce more creative
paintings? Can one’s creativity as a chef help him
write more creative short stories? Is a creative biologist likely also to be rather
creative as a teacher, a poet, and a dancer? Or, on the other
hand, is creativity quite domain specific, such that whatever leads to creativity in
one domain maybe different from that which leads to creativity in other domains?

5. Types of assessment
instrument or
assessment method
Types of Assessment
• Process based assessment
(divergent thinking tests)
Examples: Torrance Tests of
Creative Thinking
• Performance based
assessment (Assessment by
others) Examples: Group
Inventory for Finding
Creative Talent or other
instruments

6. Divergent
Thinking Test
• Divergent thinking can be explained as a thought process
used to generate creative ideas via searching for many
possible solutions. Whereas convergent thinking is the
ability to arrive the “correct” solution. Guilford who came
up with these concepts clearly underlined the difference
between them. In divergent thinking it is important to
produce as many responses to verbal or figural stimuli as
possible such that, more is better in DT.
• The research on creativity, initial efforts to assess it came
from him and his colleagues too. Though, there were others
who developed test batteries to measure creative thinking
abilities and focused mostly on process components.

7. Torrance Test
• Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT): Torrance Tests of
Creative Thinking (TTCT) is generally considered the best
measure for assessing creativity. The TTCT measures creative
attitude, creative thinking, and other problem-solving skills.
Torrance’s name was equated with assessment of creativity, but it
was not his major goal.
• TTCT was developed for research and to provide a tool that can
be used to individualize the instruction. Torrance found that
learning and thinking creatively takes place in the process of
sensing difficulties, problem, and gaps in information; making
guesses or formulating hypotheses about these deficiencies; in
testing these guesses and possibility, revising and retesting them;
and finally in communicating the results.

8. Torrance Test
Experiment
• For the Cortex study, Frohlich’s team
enrolled 20 healthy adults. Researchers
placed electrodes on each side of each
participant’s frontal scalp and a third
electrode toward the back of the scalp. This
way, the 10-Hz alpha oscillation stimulation
for each side of the cortex would be in
unison. This is a key difference in Frohlich’s
method as compared to other brain
stimulation techniques.

9. Experiment
Continue
• Each participant underwent two sessions. During one session, researchers
used a 10-Hz sham stimulation for just five minutes. Participants felt a
little tingle at the start of the five minutes. For the next 25 minutes, each
participant continued to take the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, a
comprehensive and commonly used test of creativity. In one task, each
participant was shown a small fraction of an illustration — sometimes just
a bent line on a piece of paper.
• Participants used the line to complete an illustration, and they wrote a title
when they finished. In the other session each participant underwent the
same protocol, except they were stimulated at 10 Hertz for the entire 30
minutes while doing the Torrance test. The tingling sensation only
occurred at the start of the stimulation, ensuring that each participant did
not know which session was the control session. Because rating creativity
or scoring a test can involve subjectivity, Frohlich sent each participant’s
work to the company that created the test. “We didn’t even tell the
company what we were doing,” Frohlich said. “We just asked them to
score the tests. Then Frohlich’s team compared each participant’s
creativity score for each session. He found that during the 30-minute
stimulation sessions, participants scored an average 7.4 percentage points
higher than they did during the control sessions. That’s a pretty big
difference when it comes to creativity,” Frohlich said. “Several participants
showed incredible improvements in creativity. It was a very clear effect.”

10. Experiment Continue
• Creativity, the ability to produce innovative ideas, is a key higher-order cognitive function that is poorly
understood. At the level of macroscopic cortical network dynamics, recent electroencephalography (EEG) data
suggests that cortical oscillations in the alpha frequency band (8–12 Hz) are correlated with creative thinking.
However, whether alpha oscillations play a fundamental role in creativity has remained unknown. Here we show
that creativity is increased by enhancing alpha power using 10 Hz transcranial alternating current stimulation (10
Hz-tACS) of the frontal cortex. In a study of 20 healthy participants with a randomized, balanced cross-over
design, we found a significant improvement of 7.4% in the Creativity Index measured by the Torrance Test of
Creative Thinking (TTCT), a comprehensive and most frequently used assay of creative potential and strengths.
• In a second similar study with 20 subjects, 40 Hz-tACS was used in instead of 10 Hz-tACS to rule out a general
“electrical stimulation” effect. No significant change in the Creativity Index was found for such frontal gamma
stimulation. Our results suggest that alpha activity in frontal brain areas is selectively involved in creativity; this
enhancement represents the first demonstration of specific neuronal dynamics that drive creativity and can be
modulated by non-invasive brain stimulation. Our findings agree with the model that alpha recruitment increases
with internal processing demands and is involved in inhibitory top-down control, which is an important
requirement for creative ideation.

11. Assessment Summary
• The frequency distribution (with the normal distribution
curve added) for the Standard Scores of the TTCT.
Creativity Index Average below shows more WU students
scoring at or above the mean standard score than
statistically expected. The frequency distribution for the
mean National Percentile Ranks (with the normal
distribution curve added) for the TTCT Creativity Index
shows that WU students performed better than almost
64% of students tested nation-wide.

12. Performance Based
Assessment
• A performance-based assessment measures students' ability
to apply the skills and knowledge learned from a unit or
units of study. Typically, the task challenges students to use
their higher-order thinking skills to create a product or
complete a process (Chun, 2010). Active learning, through
performance-based learning and assessment, is something
that any teacher can implement in their own classroom with
planning, preparation, and progress monitoring.
• Examples of performance assessments include composing a
few sentences in an open-ended short response, developing
a thorough analysis in an essay, conducting a laboratory
investigation, curating a portfolio of student work, and
completing an original research paper.

13. Types of
Performance
Based
Assessments

14. Summary of
Performance
Based
Learning
Assessment

16. References
• Baer, J., Kaufman, J. C., & Gentile, C. A. (2004) Extension of the consensual assessment
technique to nonparallel creative products (2004), Creativity Research Journal, 16(1), 113-
117
• Esra Kanli (2020). Assessment of Creativity: Theories and Methods Retrieved from
https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/73433
• https://www.washburn.edu/academics/general-education-files/2014-
2015%20Torrance%20Test%20of%20Creative%20Thinking%20Results%20Report.pdf