Radical rubrics : implementing the critical and creative thinking general capability through an ecological approach

• Published in: Australian educational researcher 2023-07, Vol.50 (3), p.729-745
• Main Authors: Harris, Dan, Coleman, Kathryn, Cook, Peter J.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Australian Curriculum (AC); Cognitive processes; Collaboration; Compulsory Education; Creative development; Creative Thinking; Creativity Tests; Critical Thinking; Ecology; Education; Educational Change; Educational innovation; Educational Objectives; Educational Policy and Politics; Educational Psychology; Educational Theories; Employment; Evaluation; Foreign Countries; Initial Teacher Education (ITE); Innovations; Instructional Leadership; Learning; Learning Activities; National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) (Australia); National Competency Tests; National Curriculum; Preservice teacher education; Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA); Rubrics; Scoring Rubrics; Secondary education; Students; Teaching; Teaching and Teacher Education; Teaching Methods; Thinking Skills
• ISSN: 0311-6999; 2210-5328
• DOI: 10.1007/s13384-022-00521-8

This article details how and why we have developed a flexible and responsive process-based rubric exemplar for teaching, learning, and assessing critical and creative thinking. We hope to contribute to global discussions of and efforts toward instrumentalising the challenge of assessing, but not standardising, creativity in compulsory education. Here, we respond to the key ideas of the four interrelated elements in the critical and creative thinking general capability in the Australian Curriculum learning continuum: inquiring; generating ideas, possibilities, actions; reflecting on thinking processes; and analysing, synthesising and evaluating reasoning and procedures. The rubrics, radical because they privilege process over outcome, have been designed to be used alongside the current NAPLAN tests in Years 5, 7 and 9 to build an Australian-based national creativity measure. We do so to argue the need for local and global measures of creativity in education as the first round of testing and results of the PISA Assessment of Creative Thinking approach and to contribute to the recognition of creative thinking (and doing) as a core twenty-first century literacy alongside literacy and numeracy. [Author abstract]