New research offers insights for educators on how to effectively assess creative work in K-12 classrooms. It suggests that students should be graded based on creativity, but not exclusively. Creativity is an essential skill for problem-solving, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Teachers at King Middle School in Portland, Maine, delay grades until the end of the unit to cultivate an atmosphere that encourages creativity and curiosity.
Graduating progress in the development of creativity can lead to teachers being more precise and confident in developing young people’s creativity, and learners better understanding what it is to be. However, many students enjoy art but may feel their work is not good enough or will not hold up to a teacher’s standards, leading to possible bad grades.
The clash between student creativity and grading rubrics in education is explored, with some arguing that grading students based on creativity would be best. Being graded on creativity would have the benefit of fostering the cultivation of this essential skill, nurturing their imagination, and preparing them for challenges. However, the grading system does very little, creating stress and loss of creativity.
One way to focus on assessment rather than grading is to provide feedback on the creative process without assigning a specific grade. Grading students based on their creativity can inspire independent thinking, nurture unique talents, and equip students for college and career success. Overall, the decision to grade students based on creativity depends on various factors, including the need for clear criteria for effective and useful creativity assessment within K-12 classrooms.
📹 Why Grades Shouldn’t Exist – Alfie Kohn
Part of an interview for the documentary “Carry the Tune” (http://www.carrythetune.com) Full interview: …
How does creative writing affect your academic performance?
Writing is a crucial tool in organizing and clarifying our thoughts, helping us understand and clarify what we know about a subject. It requires a clear understanding of the subject matter and cognitive abilities, particularly higher-order thinking skills such as analysis, evaluation, and creation. These skills are essential for medical students to grow into successful professionals, as they need to diagnose patient problems, mentally represent situations, plan appropriate treatments, and evaluate the entire process.
However, there is limited research on the learning effects of writing in medical education. Some schools, like Maastricht College of Medicine, use writing in their classrooms, allowing students to reflect on their learning process and reflect on their learning. Previous literature has reported conflicting evidence on the effect of writing, with some studies finding summary writing less effective than re-studying learning materials and better remembering only included items.
However, it is early to conclude that students cannot learn enough from practicing writing, as previous research only measured comprehension using rote-memory test items without testing the transfer of knowledge.
Applying learned knowledge to different areas is as important as understanding difficult concepts to deal with new patients and novel situations daily. While summary writing may not be more effective in memorizing learned contents, there is evidence that writing facilitates the transfer of knowledge. For example, Boscolo and Mason found that learning historical events through writing could be transferred to learning concepts in a different domain, science.
To improve thinking skills and application of knowledge, the effects of writing on learning should also be measured in the context of the transfer of knowledge along with accurate memorization.
What are 5 reasons why creativity is important?
Creativity is a crucial skill that is essential in various aspects of life, including art, business, and parenting. It allows individuals to approach problems and challenges with a fresh perspective, finding innovative solutions. Creativity fosters creativity, communication, adaptability, and relationship building. It has been linked to improved physical and mental health, increased happiness, and well-being.
Creativity is a valuable tool for problem-solving, breaking out of patterns of thinking and generating new, original ideas. It also helps in thinking outside the box, allowing individuals to approach problems and challenges from different angles, leading to more effective and efficient solutions. This ability to think outside the box is crucial in today’s fast-paced, rapidly changing world. Therefore, cultivating creativity is essential for success and well-being in all aspects of life.
Why should students be graded on creativity?
Teachers who assign creative classwork are more likely to observe higher-order cognitive skills in their students, such as problem-solving, critical thinking, and making connections between subjects. When teachers combine creativity with transformative technology use, they see even better outcomes. Creative work helps students connect new information to their prior knowledge, making the learning stickier.
Wanda Terral, director of technology for Lakeland School System, says that students struggle to make the learning a part of themselves moving forward due to time constraints and lack of flexibility in finding where the learning fits in their life and brain.
Why is creativity important for students?
The fostering of creativity allows for the development of diverse learning styles, which in turn facilitates more open problem-solving and innovation. It is important to recognise that individuals learn and engage in different ways.
Why is creativity important in assessment?
Creativity assessments are crucial in recruitment for organizations to identify individuals with a creative mindset. These assessments help determine a candidate’s ability to think critically, solve complex problems, and adapt to changing circumstances. They can range from evaluating past creative achievements to conducting scenario-based exercises. Incorporating creativity assessments in recruitment helps companies identify candidates with potential to drive innovation and foster a culture that values and nurtures creativity.
This environment encourages employees to explore new ideas, take risks, and collaborate across disciplines. Recognizing the role of creativity in driving innovation is vital for organizations to stay competitive in today’s fast-paced world.
Should creative writing be graded?
The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) suggests that undergraduate students should receive grades for most assignments, with revised work grades based on how well students demonstrate transformation in their composing and revising processes. Creative writing professors, including the author, use a method where students submit melodramatic and sentimental stories early in the semester, with the plot going nowhere and the prose being as purple as a priest’s vestments during Lent.
By the end of the term, the student’s dialogue has more punch, and their endings become more ambiguous. The author, who teaches creative writing, is drawn in two directions. One wants students to roam free, starting with examples and precedents and taking a more mystical approach, while the other wants them to create works that others will read. The author aims to encourage students to become public writers and not make money from their writing.
How does creativity affect academic performance?
Creative activities can enhance learning and memory consolidation, increase student motivation, and improve communication skills. Engaging in creative tasks helps students understand and retain information better. Incorporating creative elements into the instructional process increases student engagement and investment in studies. Creative expression can excel in subjects like literature, writing, and arts.
Engaging in creative activities can reduce stress and anxiety, positively impacting academic performance. However, the connection between creativity and academic performance is complex and imbalanced emphasis on creative activities at the expense of traditional subjects can have negative consequences.
Is it essential to measure creativity of students?
The assessment of creativity, as with the evaluation of other academic competencies, validates students’ strengths and abilities. This provides empirical feedback that can inform future teaching and learning practices.
Should creativity be taught in schools?
Creative thinking is a crucial life skill that teachers can help students develop in the classroom. A creative learning environment encourages students to learn through trial and error, use their imagination, and think critically to solve problems. By leveraging skills like setting goals, sharing knowledge, and building relationships, a creative learning environment helps students practice and develop their own theories and ideas.
Fostering a creative learning environment is important as it provides both direct and indirect benefits. Students can feel comfortable trying new things and making mistakes, learning persistence and better at problem-solving. Teachers can learn to nurture creativity in a classroom setting, fostering a culture of innovation and problem-solving. By fostering a creative learning environment, students can develop their skills and contribute to their personal and professional growth.
How do you grade creativity?
A Rubric for Creativity is a tool that helps teachers and students assess creativity in assignments. It describes four levels of creativity: very creative, creative, ordinary/routine, and imitative, in four areas: variety of ideas, variety of sources, novelty of idea combinations, and novelty of communication. Although it is not intended to be used for grading, rubrics help clarify criteria for success and show the continuum of performance. They are useful for sharing students’ goals, current progress, and next steps.
Another advantage of a rubric for creativity is that it functions as a visual organizer, allowing us to consider creativity alongside other criteria for the work. For example, in an acrostic poem assignment, there is more opportunity for creativity in some criteria (ideas) than in others (using the acrostic format correctly), so creativity is not entirely separate from the quality of the work. Focusing on creativity allows for feedback that may be missing in opening classroom examples.
Should academic writing be creative?
The act of composing academic texts necessitates a certain degree of creativity, as the author is required to express their ideas in a manner that is both original and effective, in order to convey their thoughts to an audience. This process is analogous to the methods employed by storytellers, musicians, and artists, who similarly strive to capture their ideas in a way that resonates with their intended audience.
📹 Art in Education, should it be graded? | Alex McKell | TEDxLuxembourgCityED
This talk by Alex McKell, delves into the question: should artwork be graded in an educational setting? Alex considers the impacts …
I got As and Bs on my report card just now and one 63. Before i even walked into my house i knew my parents wouldn’t even care about my good grades and would just zoom in on the negative. Sure enough i just got a lecture about how great my grades could’ve been, and not how good it WAS. And the reason i got a 63 in that class is because of one bad test grade. Went from a C to a D and now my parents are disappointed in me? It’s irritating and stupid.
He is correct. I met people who went to private schools without grades or exams in Europe. They all have jobs and are doing well. One alternative thing that we would have is when we could have grades, but the grades would not stop people from going on in their studies. so there is no way to fail and you still can finish school or university with a degree, whichever grades you have. We also need more project and assignment based degrees and replace exams with projects that are completed with percentage points. Like 20-30 projects with a %-grade as a mark for the result.
Not only that, grades creates an unhealthy school environment based on the “survival of the fittest” principle. It is easy for the teacher to assign a favorite student, making the assessment uneven. Even in Norway, where I come from with one of the best school systems, they oversee this matter. Suddenly you lose your integrity and motives, just to get “the grade”.
Unfortunately school’s primary reason for existing has nothing to do with learning. It’s about paying for high marks for entrance into exclusive schools in order to maintain family wealth or marry-up your child. I don’t believe in grading as it is used in a traditional classroom, as the purpose for grades are often misused. They are only a snapshot of the “general” performance of a student at any one given moment in time. The grades should only be used by teachers to help them guide the curriculum and pace of a class. We do need grades (summarized data) because they help us professionals adapt to a class’ or individual student’s learning ability.
My Geometry teacher curves all his tests if the class average is under an 87 and that works really well because the point of his class wasn’t the grade, it was growing my skills in not only Geometry, but in studying and test taking. I had a B at the start of the year and I didn’t even care. And even though we have grades, we don’t have rankings by GPA because the school encourages extracurriculars and service projects more than grades.
Is there such a thing as a legitimate school that doesn’t give grades? Also, I think just about every job out there has evaluations of some type that you have to pass to keep your job, so why not get young people in the mindset of being able to pass evaluations? You can’t manage what you don’t measure.
Grades pit the kids against each other in a meaningless competition. They also make the teacher the bad guy who flunks you out. Class rank should be determined numerically by standardized exams administered at the conclusion of each year and scored independently similar to the traditional British system.
I think grades are useful for anything below the grade of a C- because that can legitimately show how students to behave and where they struggle or tend to not care however anything C- or above grades are worthless for truly determing intelligence because some of the most intelligent people I personally know are the most lazy as such they would get a C- or whatever because they simply dont want to put in the effort to do the work and I know many people who will get straight A’s but will simply ask for help for over half of their work and they really dont understand anything but get the A because they turned in the fully complete assignment. So tell me whos smarter the person who actually understands the subject but gets low gardes due to a lack of effort to do homework or the person who doesnt understand anything about the subject but gets straight A’s because they simply do the assignment but dont actually understand any of it and simply just asks for help over and over. You would probably say the smart but lazy person but due to the poor grading system a college will see that one student got straight A’s but the other who was really smart but didnt try got a C so they will instead accept the person who got the A’s.
he’s right you know. when I was at cypress depsite already typing at 70WPM I signed up for typing courses because that was an easy A. I have a G.E.D from the state of florida that isn’t even any old GPA the scorces page places me in the 96th perentile in science over 50 in math like just all over the place on the rest and yet here I was a clearly gifted student deciding I wanted my life after class to myself and not being stuck with homework so I could actually focus on my interest from outside of school and so everything I did was searching for how not to be stuck filling out so much redundant paperwork. I am too smart for my own good regarding the G.E.D we had to fight them for special accommodations for me there was someone at test cite but he was was dragging his heels but we figured out the way they formatted people’s emails at OCPS to email his boss and go over his head to get the hold up resolved and yeah I stumbled into the building and a couple of weeks later got results and the things that fascinate me Is I wasn’t studying for the whole 18 months after i dropped out. A year and a half had gone by without me studying the stuff i was in school when I tested and I still beat almost everyone in the state who ever took the test on science and and did not too bad on math either. but yeah The whole system was too much bullshit for me and I couldn’t take it and dropped out at 17 and then took the Test and I can proudly say of the G.E.D Veni Vidi Vici I came I saw I conquererd.
My main question, and it is a genuine question, is how exactly do these students get into college or university if they have no grade to demonstrate how much they know? When I and my fellow students were applying for university in the UK we had to firstly offer our predicted grades and then had our places confirmed upon receiving our grades that matched the entrance criteria. I agree that chasing grades shouldn’t be everything but do they not have a practical use? At the end of the day I think we all agree that someone who wants to become a doctor for example should show that they are highly adept in subjects such as chemistry and biology. How is this effectively measured if not through assessed work and grades?
I did not develop a healthy desire for learning until about 4 years after I’d dropped out of high school. It used to bother me but does no more. Now, my only regret is that I didn’t do it SOONER! It wasn’t until long after I’d stopped going to school that I began to question the propriety of the status quo, and all things related… Was it effective, did it help me at all during all my time there, is there anything of value I learned there? And when I asked myself these questions, I realized that of the 10+ years I spent in school, I walked away with but only 2 things that I valued which it taught me, and only one of those two things do I do well: I learned to read and I became literate, and they taught me basic math, but I’m horrible at it. In fact I detest math because of how bad I am at it, which sucks. Because it’s an excellent skill to have. Unfortunately I have no desire to try and retrain myself in it because of my negative experiences IN SCHOOL. So… I learned BASIC math… I can add and subtract with my fingers and can ball park certain figures fairly reasonably, but I’m by no means proficient at it. Literacy, on the other hand, I’m very proficient in. I know English quite well and have a very good handle on grammar, use of grammar and punctuation, and I’m proud that I’m a person who is at least very well spoken and can write very eloquently and so forth. Aside from those two things, theres nothing. After I’d been out for some yrs, and began to take interest in certain things again, I realized that I’d been unconsciously associating the idea of learning and discovering new things with the absolute drag that it was made to be in school.
I think grades are over-rated, but not counter-productive. Through exam-like conditions, the learner learns to perform when under pressure, instead of perceiving pressure as something to be feared; to avoid; or ‘evil’ and ‘oppressive’. Learning how to cope with ‘failure’ helps one to grow and mature, and to persist. That is inner-strength.
What exactly is he suggesting that teachers should do instead? What does ‘authentically engage’ mean in practice? Teachers have to teach the content someone else has decided should be taught. While they wait for someone to change that, what are they supposed to do if the required content is boring and irrelevant? He refers to ‘research’ but which exactly does he have in mind? Schools in the UK have been increasing the number of tests given because the research on retrieval practice noticed that more testing is linked to better results in crucial examinations (because retrieving information from memory strengthens memories and increases problem solving ability and generalization).
Grades matter. There is no other way for potential graduate schools or employers to objectively assess a candidate’s potential for future performance. Using grades as a carrot/stick is wrong. Using grades to figure out where a student needs to improve is incredibly irreplaceable. So sad that this uninformed and misguided tool thinks otherwise.
Yes! I think that grading also can steer ppl/students away from taking classes they might otherwise be interested in due to the risk of failure, or of possibly getting a low grade in the course. I know I’ve definitely considered numerous courses of interest to me which I decided not to pursue simply b/c of how difficult (or time consuming) it might be to achieve a high or passing grade! There was only one time in my educational pursuits that I took a grading risk by enrolling in a course I knew I might not pass, & I only did so b/c I was immensely eager to learn about the topic: Political Science. While the course did prove to be too time consuming for me to achieve a high grade, the influence of what I learned in that course has largely impacted my life and career. It stands out as one of the best classes I’ve ever taken. It’s truly unfortunate to reflect upon the major influence that grading systems actually have had on my educational choices, and likely those of others. Thank you Alfie for your devotion to correcting our practice as parents and educators. You always provide clarity with not just your opinion, but with commentary deeply backed by research. You’re a blessing and inspiration to us all.
I really enjoyed this talk alot, but though I agree that creative freedom is important, and that also in reality art can’t be judged by an objective metric of beauty, because there isn’t one, I sti think what should be graded are the skills that are being taught, so for example, value studies, anatomy, perspective, color theory, etc. If there is no criterion then it’s basically pointless, here we’re not grading the beauty but the we’re grading the skill that is the goal to achieve at any given assignment. Which will give the student the power to artistic expression Now I agree that grading is tricky and alot of times is up to subjective judgement but we could work around that by having multiple judges and taking the average as the grade? Would that be practical? That’s up to debate and there is plenty of room for improvement there, but what I’m trying to say is that eliminating grading as a whole is not the way to go.