Teaching for Wisdom, Intelligence, Creativity, and Success by Robert J. Sternberg

Teaching for Wisdom, Intelligence, Creativity, and Success by Robert J. Sternberg

Author:Robert J. Sternberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2015-03-09T16:00:00+00:00


a. _______________________________

b. _______________________________

c. _______________________________

d. _______________________________

The correct answer is: _______________________________

Question 2 [Open-Ended]:

Describe what key elements you expect in the answer:

15

Assessing and Rating Creative Skills

Creative items require students to: create (e.g., a comic strip summarizing a story they’ve read); imagine (e.g., a new ending to a story); invent (e.g., a science experiment); or suppose (e.g., What would happen if everything was twice the size it is now?), as we saw in examples in Part II. When we conduct teacher professional-development workshops, most participants agree that it is a good idea to introduce additional creative activities in the classroom, and at the end of the training session most teachers have come up with their own sample creative activities. Some teachers are concerned about meeting the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, but teaching students to think creatively should enhance test scores for students who are creative learners, while helping other students to realize the importance of creative thinking. In general, when it comes to discussing assessment; however, teachers are more reluctant to embrace the value of creative thinking skills. “You can’t assess it,” “It would be arbitrary, everyone has his or her own definition of creativity,” and “Creativity can’t be defined,” are some of the objections we have encountered. It is possible, though, (a) to develop assessment items that tap primarily into creative skills, and (b) to rate student answers to these questions just as reliably as you rate answers to open-ended analytical or practical questions. In the Appendix to Part I, there are some suggestions for further readings for those of you who are interested in learning more about the theory behind this approach to teaching and assessment. Many of the references also provide examples from past PACE work, demonstrating just how reliably we can assess creative skills in students’ work.

Here, we will provide you with plenty of examples to illustrate how you can design a question targeting creative thinking skills and how you can rate students’ answers. You will also see examples of forced-choice questions, and we will discuss the particular challenge posed by designing creative multiple-choice questions. (Yes, it is a challenge, but there is a way to do it!)

LANGUAGE ARTS

The following is an example of an open-ended response question in language arts designed to assess creative skills from the elementary school unit, previously mentioned in Chapter 13, called “True Wonders.” After having studied the literary genre of wonder tales, students are given the following task in the end-of-unit assessment: “Suppose your teacher assigns a report on a science topic. You have found a great deal of information on your topic. Be imaginative and describe what you can do or make to show what you have learned.”

Accurate answers describe products students can make to demonstrate their knowledge of the science topic (e.g., a poster, a report, an article, a children’s science book, a news article, or a graphic organizer), or performances (e.g., a presentation, a videotape, panel, or a radio show report). The number of points attributed to



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