Developing An Assessment Of Creative Potential For Elementary Students

Based on the most fundamental educational issue of "what kind of people should be cultivated in education",creativity is mentioned in the core competencies framework developed by many countries.Creativity has become an important part of 21st century skills and a key educational goal.The creativity from sociocultural perspective emphasizes the generation of products,so individuals who are regarded as creative must be able to generate original and useful products.However,in the field of school,students show more of creative potential than a true sense of creativity because of their limited knowledge and experience.This potential is closely related to students'experience,it doesn't necessarily need to produce influential products,but it's happening in the students' learning process.Therefore,the product-oriented creativity doesn't apply to the school field and more and more scholars are calling for the return to individual potential to study students',creativity.Under the school field,the characteristics and classroom performance of students with high creative potential have always been the issues that educators urgently need to know.In order to solve this problem,this study focuses on students' creative potential and develops the observation instrument which is suitable for observing students'creative potential in the classroom.It can help educators to understand the creative potential and students' behaviors in the classroom,and scientifically explore and develop students' creative potential.Firstly,this study builds a theoretical framework that is consistent with students' creative potential based on literature review.Secondly,based on the ideas of triangulation method,the student scale,the teacher scale and the observation instrument are developed,and then these scales are revised through cognitive interview,expert review and data analysis.Thirdly,the student scale and the teacher scale are used as the calibration to test the measurement quality of the observation instrument.Finally,combined with the three scales and students classroom performance,the differences in behavioral performance of students with different creative potential in the classrooms were analyzed.The main conclusions are as follows.Firstly,the theoretical framework of students' creative potential includes two dimensions and eight indicators.The two dimensions are creative personality and creative thinking.Specifically,the former includes curiosity,risk-taking,enjoying challenge,and high energy.The latter includes fluency,flexibility,originality,and elaboration.The theoretical framework is reasonable and valid based on data analysisSecondly,the theoretical framework can match many corresponding students'behaviors in the classroom,and teachers can create different situations to stimulate students' performance.Thirdly,the student scale and the teacher scale in the triangulation method have high reliability and validity.The student scale,the teacher scale,and the observation instrument are highly consistent with each other,which indicates that three scales can be mutually verified and the observation instrument has a high criterion validity.At the same time,the observation instrument also has a high inter-rater reliability.Therefore,this observation instrument has good reliability and validity.Fourthly,the indicators of students with different creative potential have similarities and differences in different disciplines.That is,a)no matter what type of students,the classroom performance corresponding to the indicators of creative potential is easy to highlight in science,especially in the natural courses.b)the indicators of students who have high/medium creative potential can be reflected in one subject,whereas the indicators of students who have low creative potential rarely appear in any subject.