Conceptualising an assessment for gifted students – how can we assess creativity?

Conceptualising an assessment for gifted students – how can we assess creativity?

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Conceptualising an assessment for gifted students – how can we assess creativity?

How can we discover whether students are gifted in a subject? Can we conceive of an assessment that will allow these students to extend their work and be identified for their expertise and creativity in a subject?To consider how to assess whether students are gifted at a subject, we need to think about what kinds of responses we expect to see from these students. Do we expect them to go beyond the task given? Is it fair to expect any student to do this without telling them so in the task? How can we identify expertise and creativity in a fixed task? We have developed an interactive assessment system called the Support Model (Ahmed &, Pollitt, in press 2009) which we originally designed to help low ability students understand and complete tasks. This system might also provide a solution for how to assess gifted children. Support model prompts are based on our research into the cognitive processes involved in answering exam questions, and have so far been used to ensure students understand what is expected of them, and to help them to achieve it. But we can also use prompts to extend a task, and therefore the Support Model could be used to assess how students respond to such task extension. Can the students go beyond the original task? Can they go on to generalise from the task given to other examples? Can they think about the task in novel ways? Do they need prompts, and how much support do they need to exploit the prompts and modify their responses?Examples will be shown from English National Curriculum tests in writing and mathematics for 11 year olds.

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