Jon Mortimer, Middlesex University, School of Art and Design
Is transparency important for assessing creativity? Nationally, assessment and feedback is the lowest scoring category of the National Student Survey (NSS). For Jon’s programme their assessment and feedback satisfaction score has risen 25% over the last 3 years to 89%. Jon’s presentation describes how this was achieved.
‘How do you assess creativity?’ was the main problem that needed the teaching team’s attention. Assessment instils a pursuit of grades, a measure of how well you are doing compared to your peers and others who have come before you. How you as a teacher do you make this judgement when assessing creativity? And equally importantly how do you communicate this to students so they are aware of what is expected of them?
In Art and Design, students are commonly set design tasks to demonstrate their creativity. Jon says ‘in design it doesn’t matter how simple or detailed the question is there are thousands of possible answers…the job of the tutor is to help students think about the right questions to find the personal answers, that’s where the artist side of designing comes out’.
In the absence of clear assessment criteria for creativity, the tendency is for students to align their work to well received work of their predecessors and the creative inclinations of their assessors. This is clearly counterproductive and stifles creativity.
If you think about how students engage with assessment, students use their experience, design knowledge and creative talents. Creativity often involves asking increasingly complex questions, to produce a design, in most cases the final end product is arrived at after a process of changes in the designs over time. This design process needs to be acknowledged in assessment.
Jon says when assessing creativity there is a tension between connoisseurship and transparent assessment criteria. Jon describes the use of a marking rubric that includes the development process or the design journey in the assessment criteria. The assessment criteria has some degree of flexibility in that it is open to change through valid arguments raised by students at the start of the module.
Clearly informing students about the assessment criteria from the onset helps students approach assessment knowing what is expected of them. Students are asked to present their work, these are made available for both peer and staff feedback. This approach may also provide a way of reducing the subjectivity and bias in assessing creativity. Watch the presentation to see how the teaching team breaks up the assessment criteria to present it visually and use video feedback.
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