Teaching FOR Creativity: Pretty cool preliminary data

Teaching FOR Creativity: The preliminary data…

So far, I've been writing about things that I've been trying in my classroom to encourage creative thinking and have posted some examples of lessons, book reviews and other rambling ideas that I have on the topic. One thing I haven't done yet is show some of the preliminary data I've been collecting.  

Here is the data, in visual form from last (2nd) marking period. It shows the average amount of responses from 150 students on three separate testing dates over a nine week marking period.  As I get new students every nine weeks, I am focusing on adding assessment for an additional component of creativity. Next marking periods data chart will also show assessment for elaboration.

Fluency: The number of ideas students can come up with in a defined amount of time.  For this marking period, students were given 3 minutes to come up with a list of ideas of things you could do with the following objects on these dates: 11/1 a dollar bill, 12/1 a fork and on 1/13 a sheet of computer paper. The average of 150 students results are shown in blue.

For this test, I'm just looking for the number of ideas that the student can come up with. Creative or not, all ideas count!

Flexibility/Originality: The number of original ideas or ideas that show flexible thinking when thinking about what they could do with an object.  In example, a flexible response for a use for a fork could be "using forks to link/weave together to make a screen door".  An inflexible or unoriginal response might be "to eat with" or "to stab something with". The average of 150 students results are shown in red.

For this test, I spent a considerable amount of time reviewing all of the students fluency lists and made a master "common response list" of typical object use ideas.  All ideas that showed flexible or original thinking made the cut to count for the students "flexibility/originality" score.  

What I'm noticing: While it's great that both fluency and flexibility/originality numbers rise as the marking period goes on, it is interesting to notice some of the particulars. Most obvious is the rate of change from the first test date to the second test date.  While the amount of original/flexible ideas dramatically rises, the overall fluency numbers rise just a little.  My theory is that as students learn how to come up with more creative /flexible thinking, their internal veto system sets in and they start to cut out the less original ideas and accept only the more creative ideas that seem worthy to put to paper.  By the end of the marking period, they finally "get" that "all ideas are good ideas" and know that the more ideas they generate, creative or not, the better.  

This marking period, in addition to collecting data on fluency and flexibility/originality, I'm also collecting data on elaboration. I am collecting data in two ways for this skill. The first is through asking the students to complete a simple drawing such as a circle or "S" shape and the other method is through seeing how many twists and turns a student can add to a story starter (elaborating on a story).  These results will be available in a few weeks when the last batch of data is collected.

I love action research!  I am always looking for people to collaborate with and hope that this blog reaches more people with this interest!  I would love learning about other ways to collect data. Please comment and pass along! Thanks!