Matthew Worwood:
What if the future of creativity in education depends not only on nurturing it, but on finding better ways to see it and measure it? In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Shelchuk Achar, a leading researcher on creativity assessment and divergent thinking. Together we’ll explore how AI may transform the way creativity is measured and what educators can do to better recognize and support the creative potential of their students. Hello everyone. My name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood:
This is the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Cyndi Burnett:
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the fields of education.

Matthew Worwood:
We’ll be talking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity.

Cyndi Burnett:
All with a goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers, administrators, and emerging scholars with the they need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.

Matthew Worwood:
So let’s begin.

Cyndi Burnett:
Dr. Salchuka Jar is a professor of Educational Psychology at the University of North Texas. His primary area of research interest includes divergent thinking, assessment of creativity, and the education of the gifted and talented. In addition to numerous book chapters and encyclopedia entries, Dr. Adjar has published over 80 peer reviewed articles primarily on creativity, and he has served as a PI in a Creativity Measurement Grant by the Institute of Education Sciences to develop a new measure of original thinking called moats, which we’ll be talking about today. Dr. Adjar is a recipient of numerous awards and we are thrilled to have him here today. And I have to say that Salchuk has taught me so much about quantitative research and I’m so grateful for his mentorship in that area because we had the opportunity to work together for about five years at the what is now known as center for Applied Imagination at SUNY Buffalo State University.

Cyndi Burnett:
So Salchuk, it’s about time we’ve had you on the show. Welcome.

Selcuk Acar:
Thanks for having me. Appreciate that. And also I have to add that I learned so much from you and my other colleagues at Buffalo State. So, so grateful for it.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, Selchiuk, I want to start with a question that Matt and I receive all the time when we’re working with teachers and that is how do we measure creativity in education?

Selcuk Acar:
A good question and not necessarily an easy one. So when I am doing some professional development training programs with teachers, I share my work with them and I try to give them some ideas about how they can adapt those tasks that I use for purely research purposes. I think I see at least two ways here. One is more domain general approach. Basically what Creativity researchers do. And you can basically adapt the same ideas, use the same ideas like ask open ended questions and then in the responses that you receive from your students, you look for some patterns. How many ideas do your students give and are they diverse enough? Are they original enough? By posing some open ended questions, you give them the opportunity to express themselves and show how unique way of thinking they have. So that’s one way.

Selcuk Acar:
So basically learn from what the researchers do and use it in your classroom. The other one is using your own content and ask questions that uses your key concepts and key ideas, key principles that you want to teach, and then use the same idea that I just mentioned, turn them into open ended questions and give students opportunities to express themselves. Creativity is multifaceted and complex. So I think by following either of those approaches, and ideally both of those approaches first, you can use creative assessment principles as like icebreaking activities to let them think creatively to begin with. And then you can also purposefully integrate creativity into your curriculum by changing your key topics, key teams, key principles into some open ended questions. I think the key part there is that what we use as a term is ill defined. Creativity is ill defined. So by giving them too many constraints, too many structures, too many guidelines, we are sometimes restricting our students way of thinking.

Selcuk Acar:
So posing them open ended questions is a natural way of assessing creative thinking and also giving them the opportunity to think in a creative way. I mean you can go beyond that and you can also use some structured methodologies. But I think when it comes to assessment, the field is mostly benefiting from open ended tasks because they allow people to express themselves and show their own way of thinking, their unique way of thinking.

Cyndi Burnett:
So Selchuk, talk a little bit more about domain specific versus domain relevant because I don’t think it’s a topic we’ve talked about on the show before.

Selcuk Acar:
Yeah, it’s one of the interesting subjects that I also have studied a little bit in recent years. Actually it’s one of those topics where field has reached some consensus, but still there is some controversy there. So according to one group of scholars, creativity is mostly domain general. And then skills like divergent thinking, personality, motivation, those will apply to various domains and areas more or less the same way. Whereas some others think that, well, if you are creative in math, that doesn’t necessarily apply to being creative in music. Right. So the skill sets required for creative expression across those fields may not be the same, will not be the same. John Baer actually took this argument to go as far as saying that there is no such Thing as creativity, because creativity is unique to the domains.

Selcuk Acar:
So one area of expression, expression is entirely distinct from another area of expression, another domain of expression. I think this debate has implications for assessment as well. When we think about Torrent’s test of creative thinking, most famous one, most divergent thinking tasks, they are based on domain general creative thinking. So for you to answer to those questions, you don’t have to develop a domain expertise. Anyone can answer those questions. Whereas when I pose you a specific question on math, you have to have basics, math, basics of math, so that you answer questions creatively in that domain. So I think when we talk about that issue, we have to define what the domain is. And my definition of domain is that an area where you have to develop some level of expertise beyond basic level of education.

Selcuk Acar:
The classic tests have been domain general, and now there is a little more push toward domain specific assessments. And we don’t have many of them. We have some tests on scientific creativity, we have some tests on mathematical creativity, but I can’t say that they have become mainstream. And there’s a good reason for that. If you want to assess creativity in every single domain, that’s a lot of testing, right? And mostly what we see happening in schools when it comes to testing is it’s through creativity assessment. More specifically, it’s through gift identification. You don’t want to give this many tests for gift identification. So domain general tests are still useful, especially when you consider that those tests are given at the elementary school level.

Selcuk Acar:
Domain expertise isn’t necessarily expected at those ages. But when we think about creativity assessment at advanced years, high school, undergraduate, even doctoral levels, then domain specific assessments could be more useful, especially at the doctoral level, because you want your prospective students to show their creativity with some level of expertise or knowledge, at least some Internet should be there to think creatively about them. I think whichever option we choose, I think at the end of the day it’s more about predicting future creative behavior. That’s the golden criteria of creativity assessment. And I don’t think we have a lot of studies on this. So studies that compare domain general tests with domain specific tests and which one does a better job in predicting future creative achievement. We don’t have studies like that. But intuitively I can say that there are definitely benefits in adopting more domain specific tests.

Selcuk Acar:
And that might be a good way to actually integrate curriculum into assessment as well. Because you want a science teacher to know creative expression of their students in science, even though they may not be at the same level in a music class, right? So domain Specific expression is definitely, definitely important. But on the other hand, I would also say that there should be a good positive correlation between domain general creativity and and domain specific creativity. So in my view and many other scholars agree with me on this, it’s both. The debate is result for many, it’s both. Creativity is a mix of domain general and domain specific skills. So having the capacity to show domain general abilities give you some foundational skillset, but that doesn’t guarantee that you will be successful in each and every domain of creativity. Domain specific skills should also develop on top of it.

Selcuk Acar:
It’s practically a psychometric question and I don’t have a quick answer because I haven’t seen many studies comparing these two. But future research should probably do address that. But I know that there is also a push for more domain, more real life creativity assessments. Remember our bus that you conducted together? So the prompt there was about how to increase bus use in Buffalo, Niagara Falls area where that’s a real problem and you want people to think in a creative way about that realistic problem. It’s still divergent thinking because you ask people to think in many different directions. But still instead of asking for users for a break, you’re asking a real life challenge. So some scholars argue that asking such realistic questions are in general better for ecological validity of divergent thinking tests or creativity tests in general.

Matthew Worwood:
I’m going to unpack some of the stuff that you said there because it was, it was definitely related to some of the follow up questions that we had around the downturn sides and upsides of measuring creativity and why we even value measuring creativity. Because as you said at the very beginning, creativity is quite complicated and you kind of alluded to, there’s an, there’s an element of aptitude in there as well. And you know, you reference domain expertise so you have to have the ability obviously to acquire a lot of knowledge and then I think make some really great connections between that knowledge, seeing things that perhaps people in your domain haven’t seen before. So I was wondering perhaps if you could talk a little bit about any kind of correlation that we see when, when someone might score high in a kind of domain general test and for, for our listeners who might not be familiar with it, that could be something like, you know, come up with all the different uses of a paperclip, right? And then you’re kind of like looking at measuring things like their flexible thinking, their originality, how many ideas that they generate, the appropriateness of their ideas. And you can kind of apply that to anyone probably in a room 200 students, for example. But then we’ve got to go and say, well, does that thinking apply to kind of, you know, an emerging biologist, for example? And can they still think creatively in that way? So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that relationship between what we see within people who score high for those domain general tests and then any expressions of creative thinking in their domain in the future.

Selcuk Acar:
Yeah, great question. Even one of my first studies with Mark Branko was about experiential bias and divergent thinking. A 2010 study. Even with the domain general divergent thinking tests where anyone could relate to, we have found that past experiences, our memory are playing a big part, right? So memory and our unique experiences are definitely fueling creativity when it comes to domain specific tasks. The role of expertise knowledge is becoming even a bigger role. It’s even more important now. If you don’t have the knowledge base, right, you have fewer repertoire, fewer pieces of information to ideate around. It might also lead to an opposite effect.

Selcuk Acar:
Too much knowledge can sometimes be constraining, right? Because you are limited by what you already know. And sometimes you start to think within those parameters, within that box that you learn. But in general it helps you to think in more creative ways. So it’s definitely, I would hypothesize that probably the role of memory and experiences, expertise are going to play a bigger part in such domain specific tasks than it does for domain general tasks. But for both, they are important. Knowledge is still very important for creative thinking. Our past experience are still very important for creative output. In fact, I see that industrial organizational psychologists are using those kind of hybrid thinking tests more often than educators.

Selcuk Acar:
For educators, we want to see kids thinking in a creative way no matter what because we pay attention to potential. They look into creative performance, so they want to see if the test is actually giving you direct results in short term, while we are interested in the long term benefits. So they are more interested in domain specific open ended tasks. But regardless, I think our past experiences are important. Our knowledge, our expertise are important for both. That’s why we have the 10 year or 10 years of experience so that you have the knowledge base to make a contribution to a field. Classic simultaneous study and many others. Kaufman also did that study.

Selcuk Acar:
So it’s all. I mean, when we say sometimes that schools kill creativity, right? I mean it’s so common that people say that. I think we are forgetting that when schools teach well, they are actually investing in creativity. It’s more about whether you’re teaching well or not. It’s an indirect way of supporting creativity because kids will learn the concepts and now you’re giving them the opportunity to think creatively with them. But it’d be better if they teach in a creative way so that you’re also directly investing in their creative capabilities. So it would be both this way and knowledge is the foundation of creative thinking. And we see that in the assessments, actually.

Selcuk Acar:
So when we look into think aloud studies and when we ask even kids how you came up with those studies, most of them are coming from their experiences. Some of highly creative ones are still combinations. Right. They combine their experiences, their knowledge to come up with some new ideas. You see some imaginations, some makeup ideas, but they are not the majority. But they are more likely to be creative. So knowledge is there, but with domain specific tasks, the importance of expertise and knowledge would be, I would hypothesize, would be even more important.

Matthew Worwood:
And that was also a follow up I almost went with as well, because for our educators or our listeners out there, we have the divergent thinking side of creativity and then the convergent thinking, which is ultimately choosing the answer that we think is most appropriate for the task. And that’s where that knowledge can, can really benefit from us. And I actually think Arthur Cropley uses that quote, you know, knowledge is a world to which ideas are drawn. And I’m just wondering from a test perspective, you know, if you could talk a little bit about, you know, are we skewing a little bit toward the divergent thinking side of things and less on the convergent thinking? And the reason why I bring that up is that we have had conversations on the podcast about, you know, we may have creativity, but underneath the creativity bracket, there might be more creative thinking, divergent thinking, and then critical thinking, which is more of the convergent thinking side of things.

Selcuk Acar:
Yeah, that’s a great question. Yes. Historically we have been on the divergent side and way heavily on the divergent side. And I think, and I think there’s a reason for that. We assume that, or maybe we have observed that convergent thinking is there already. When kids respond to close ended questions, multiple choice questions, they are trained for convergent thinking already. Or when you test them for intelligence IQ tests, convergent thinking is assessed there already. Right? So you want to focus on things that are not necessarily emphasized or tested in schools.

Selcuk Acar:
That’s the historical justification for it, in my opinion. But also, it’s important to remember that divergent thinking tests, early, very early divergent taking tests were part of intelligence tests. They were part of the intelligence Test, they were dander up. So I think the early scholars who thought about human intellectual, human intellect, they talk about both convergent and divergent thinking aspects of it. But conceptually and theoretically, I agree that creative process have to have both. Right. And if you are a truly great divergent thinker and when you fail at selecting the best idea, or if you fail to notice the most promising idea, all of that divergent phase may be wasted potentially. Right.

Selcuk Acar:
So there’s a big risk there. Then question comes, do people who come up with many creative ideas are good at selecting good ideas? Right. That’s the question. Research shows that it’s a yes, it’s not guaranteed, it’s not a very strong correlation, but there is some weak to moderate correlation between idea generation and idea selection. But it’s a weak to model of correlation. So you definitely have to look into convergence site as well. And that’s why create problem solving as a full framework is important, because people are going through that phase and there are individual differences in how they accomplish in each of those different stages of creative problem solving. I’ll bring up our measure here modest, because one of the decisions we made when it comes to modest is that instead of asking two, three prompts and trying to get too many responses for a few prompts, we limited the number of responses to one.

Selcuk Acar:
And we asked a lot of prompts so that we do not rely on only a few prompts because prompts play a role set. Prompts that you select can bias people. If you have expertise in that particular bias. If you dealt with it too much, you’re going to. Your scores will be skewed just because of your experience rather than your creativity. Right. And also we wanted to avoid what we call the fluency confound, because fluency is not the creativity indicator. It’s one of the indicators to us, it’s originality, original thinking.

Selcuk Acar:
So we wanted to emphasize originality. And by limiting the number of responses to a single response to just one, we actually force our kids to select the best idea. We give them the instructions that these are the kind of ideas that we want to see right. And surprising ideas. This is an example of a surprising idea. And this is an example of a not very surprising idea. We want you to think that way. We want you to think like Sophia, our kid character.

Selcuk Acar:
So Sophia role models for them. So it kind of teaches them how to think creatively. So by making that decision, we also notice that we are measuring creativity by combining divergent and convergent thinking because they have to first ideate but at the end of the day, they have to select just one response. So their discretion, their selection of the best promising idea, the idea that complies with our instructions for them, will be our final unit of measurement. So we found that our instrument is showing some good correlation with academic achievement because we integrated that convergent side of it. And convergent thinking is heavily required in academic learning. So it can, it kind of explains. So I think you’re right.

Selcuk Acar:
And I think actually we are doing some other research right now where we are seeing if the number of responses you request is changing the correlation of divergent thinking tests with convergent thinking tests. And the question we pose is, are we convergizing divergent thinking tests by limiting the number of responses? And that way we are inviting more of the convergent elements into divergent thinking. So it’s interesting, but by designing the test itself, by allowing 10 responses or 6 responses or a single response, you’re changing the nature of the creative thinking tests. And it could be more on the divergent end of the spectrum or a little more balanced with a combination of divergent and convergent thinking. But conceptually you’re right, idea generation is key. And typically I’m not speaking about United States more specifically, but in general, around the world, kids find way less opportunities to think in creative ways compared to convergent thinking. And by giving them those opportunities to think in open ended terms, I think that’s one way to very easily and directly support creative thinking. But that doesn’t mean that that’s what creative thinking is all about.

Selcuk Acar:
It’s an entire process. And if you have to reduce that process into two words, that’s divergent thinking and convergent thinking. But also, as I explained before, there’s historical reason why when it comes to creativity, we heavily emphasize divergent thinking rather than convergent thinking. Because convergent thinking is kind of captured through academic achievement tests and through intelligence test.

Cyndi Burnett:
Salchiuk, there’s so much to unpack there. So first of all, I want to say, when I introduced you, I called it Moats, but it sounded like you called it something else. So what do you call it?

Selcuk Acar:
Motes.

Cyndi Burnett:
Motes. And how far along is this test that you’ve been working on? And do people have access to it? So if a school wanted to adopt it, are you at that stage of allowing people to try it out, to use it? Can you tell us more about that?

Selcuk Acar:
Yeah, yeah, definitely. The test is at this point completed. So the project ended in 2024 and we have used it with the schools. So we are actually supporting some schools through our test. We have a demo version where people can just see the items and see the instructions, and we have the full version where you can actually complete the entire set. It’s available in English only, but there’s some interest for adaptation to other languages as well. It’s a verbal test and we are hoping to extend this to figural version of MOTIS as well. The key thing about MOTIS is that, or our contribution is that, yes, we know that divergent thinking tests are good and useful, but they are very hard to score.

Selcuk Acar:
They are very subjective to score or takes a lot of time to score. So can we use some technological support here to score them in a more standard, in a more objective and in a more reliable way? So with my colleagues Denis Dumas and Peter Organizzak, we developed a scoring methodology that applies to alternate users tests, Sentences test and instances tests, bunch of verbal tests. And we got to a point where now originality and appropriateness can be now scored, but our emphasis still on originality. And we use AI to score that. And we found that AI is very good at mimicking humans. We first train our graduate students to score it. Once we see that they reach a high level of reliability, we use their scores to train AI to mimic them. And AI is successful in mimicking them.

Selcuk Acar:
So that’s the transformation that we have aimed to make. Even though technology has changed since we proposed the grant, so we adapted to the new technology on the go. The test is doing very well and, and yes, it’s ready to use in schools and we are supporting schools for gift. Gift identification efforts or for other efforts as well.

Matthew Worwood:
So, Selchuk, we have to talk about AI right now and how that might relate to assessments. Is this going to be a tool that is going to perhaps assist it? You alluded to it a little bit early in your previous answer when you were talking about can technology assist us with perhaps being a little bit more objective in the results? What’s your take of AI and how do you see it helping the future of creativity when it comes to measurements, particularly in education?

Selcuk Acar:
I think like with any technology, it’s going to cause a change and some of that change will be very exciting, very positive. Some of that will cause some troubles and there is no way to resist it, in my opinion. We just have to just make it better for in general, we have to just make it useful for humanity, for as many people as possible, or diminish its potential weaknesses or damages. But there is no point in resisting it. My example is almost no one is washing their clothes by hand these days. We all have machines. But that caused some challenges back in the day for some people. There are some business around it.

Selcuk Acar:
I’m sure that it, it caused some damage there. AI is the same to me as someone who got trained for scoring Torus Test of Creative thinking for two days for the figural version and then several weeks to prove that I’m good at scoring it. That’s. I love the test by the way. It’s a very nice test to me. But the scoring takes time, right? And it’s not a creative thing to score a test. Let me put it that way. It’s a boring thing actually, once you master it and when you learn the thing, which is good for scholarship and research and everything, but doing that scoring over and over and over, it’s boring, right? So my hope with AI is that can we use it in a smart way where we can actually delegate boring and routine tasks to AI and then we create more space for our own creativity, for our own higher order thinking skills in general.

Selcuk Acar:
So that’s my hope with AI. But I also know that humans can get lazy very easily, right? And then we can just use it for anything and everything or use it in a way that it replaces us. And it depends on how we use it, right? But just because some people use it for bad reasons should not justify that. We should neglect it. We should turn our way. I think we have to weigh, we have to find ways to use it in a good way. And schools are already doing that. Some schools are doing that.

Selcuk Acar:
I’m hearing that some teachers are changing their assessment methodology now instead of taking home your essay, you have to write it in the school. And there are some ways around it still that we challenge our kids ourselves to think in a creative way. But to me there is no turning back when it comes to assessment. It already made our jobs very, very easy. You can now just post any open ended question to our platform called OXAI O C S A I. And Peter Organisch, my colleague at Denver University has created that platform. You can just ask an open ended question and then responses can be automatically scored. Now it doesn’t have to be specific prompts these days because AI is learning from the nature of tasks that we give them.

Selcuk Acar:
And then they can now generalize to other tasks. Not as good as the standard tasks, but still they can learn from the past existing tasks. So that’s an improvement. Now you can imagine a teacher now open, just putting Oxeye and then asking kids to give your responses for this prompt and then and rewarding them for their creative ideas. Right. And give them feedback based, immediate feedback based on their responses. That’s an improvement and there is no reason for ignoring that improvement and what happens as a result. In the past days, maybe if you wanted to study creativity and if you know that it’s better to adopt an open ended test, you would know that you have to have several graduate assistants dedicated to score the tasks and reach reliability.

Selcuk Acar:
If you know that that’s a long shot and that’s a lot of effort, you could just drop creative tests from your research study because it’s about resources and you have scarce resources. Now with those developments we are going to see probably more and more creativity research because it’s now easier to study creative, to measure creativity using AI based assessment tools. So you see how change in one area is actually creating change in many diverse areas and that’s just missing the research side effect. You can imagine other fields, how other fields are benefiting from that. But we are now excited actually last week on Thursday, my colleague Peter and I have learned that and Iksha, we learned that we got a new NSF brand where our scoring platform is now transforming into a platform where kids are given instant feedback on their creative ideation and now they are going to have a creativity companion where they co create with the AI based system. So basically they can work with AI on a creative project and they can actually ideate together, converge together, use some of the tools that we taught at Buffalo State, Cindy together. So basically you don’t require a human being as a facilitator. You can co create with AI because AI is able to process your responses, give you feedback and maybe potentially facilitate some of the tools for you and then you can get more creative.

Selcuk Acar:
As a result of this engagement with AI, are there going to be some problems there? Absolutely. If you have to talk about bias in AI and many other issues in AI, no change is easy, no change is seamless. There are going to be some problems probably there are going to be some data issues like confidentiality issues. We have to be careful on those issues as well. We should not ignore them. But at the end of the day, it’s a change that we have to recognize as a big promise and we have to adapt our systems to it because kids are using it already. Kids are using it already. But if you create systems around how to use it and give them some right tools to use it effectively, I think it’s going to make a more positive change.

Selcuk Acar:
So that’s how I see the AI when it comes to assessment in a way that it’s now influencing creativity development as well.

Cyndi Burnett:
Salchuk, I think that is so exciting and maybe it’s taken you so long to get on the podcast because you were meant to tell us that because it just happened. Because I feel like if we had a conversation with you a year ago, we wouldn’t have been talking about these things. But thinking about a teacher being able to go to a website and input speakers students ideas or be able to have students collaborate and, and generate ideas and use creative thinking and use creative problem solving and then be able to get feedback on how their ideas are creative is just so exciting. And being able to assess that creativity through AI is very exciting. So we’ll be sure to put that link in our show notes for those of you interested. And I just, I think that has been one of the most exciting things I’ve heard about using AI in the classroom. So being able to really assess for creativity without the challenges of sitting there and trying to mark each little detail which teachers often don’t have the time for. So really exciting development there.

Cyndi Burnett:
Thank you.

Selcuk Acar:
Yeah, it’s a growing science actually. So it’s not us, but several other teams are also working on. This idea dates back to earlier research on somatic distance. But now with the advances in AI, we have shown that actually AI based scoring is beating any other system so far. So I mean, correlations with human ratings were just close to perfect. So it was amazing how AI can learn and mimic humans when it comes to our tasks, not in general. Yeah, I mean the benefits of that and how much time is saved there is just beautiful. And the time saved from routine tasks, that’s the important thing.

Selcuk Acar:
Time saved from routine tasks. Scoring is the key part there. So that’s the part I’m most excited about. The other thing is, even when it comes to bias in AI, I think we have systems in place to detect bias in AI. But we should not ignore the fact that humans have biases too. Right. And it’s harder to detect biases in humans compared to AI. So our default currently is still human.

Selcuk Acar:
Right. We rely on their judgments. And when we criticize AI for potential issues here and there, we have to be fair to our reference point, which is how we do things with humans. So that’s another perspective to contextualize the challenges there.

Matthew Worwood:
Well, Sachuk, we are getting really pressed for time. I think we have to come to our last question, but I know Cindy and I will certainly be following up some of the things that you Shared on our debrief. And perhaps there’s an opportunity to bring you back on the show once you finish your project, hopefully with the funding from NSF grant. So our final question is this. Can you think back to a really creative experience that you had in the classroom? A learning experience from, from an educator or somewhere else? Why was it so memorable to you and what impact did it have on you?

Selcuk Acar:
Yeah, that’s a great question. Actually if I reflect on my K12 experiences, most of my experiences I wouldn’t portray as creative for the most part, large crowded classrooms in front of typical teacher centered education. I remember two moments where I felt like I learned something original and that can help me to explain the world for me. The first one was my undergraduate class when I was given the challenge of selecting an educational psychologist and do a research about it. Remember again, this is open ended, ill defined. So I’m in charge, I’m going to select the person and it also invites my interests. So I have the options there. But there are some boundaries still, right? That paper was on Vygotsky and I remember still what Vygotsky is for, zone of proximal development.

Selcuk Acar:
What it means for a teacher or a parent to help a kid realizing the potential, investing in the potential. I remember that assignment very well even today and used some of these ideas even today. Even more influential experience for me was my seminar class with Mark Branko. That’s when I was at UGA and Mark was there as a endowed Torrens professor. He would assign us 3, 4 articles per each week. And I knew that I was interested in assessment. But through reading these articles and through the challenge that he gave us at the end of this class, everybody will develop an assessment tool. Doesn’t have to be perfect, but identify a gap in the literature.

Selcuk Acar:
What kind of concept, what kind of idea is worthwhile to develop an assessment for? And then what kind of processes do you have to follow to develop that instrument? I never expected this project to become my. One of my later publications. That classroom project that I developed with my colleague Sadat, Sadat Chen became one of the journal articles that we published together actually within a year or so. So what’s happening there is that your professor, your instructor is giving you the tools, the literature base for you to develop an expertise, right? So you know what kind of assessment tools are used in the fields, what kind of reliability and validity evidence do they have and what kind of assessments haven’t, have not been developed yet. So you develop a foundational base knowledge there. Second is every week you’re debriefing, you’re reflecting, you’re having conversations. So you’re actually solidifying your ideas. You’re also learning from psychometrics.

Selcuk Acar:
So all of the coursework that you take from other professors, methodological or psychometric knowledge, now you’re combining them with your creativity literature knowledge, and you’re putting them into one concrete idea together. I learned so much from this project. I learned about psychometrics. I learned about using theory as a basis for instrument development. I learned about peer review process. It’s simply by a creative person, an instructor, a leader in our field, who design a course in a way that it’s appropriately challenging for us. It’s not time to read about other people’s instrument. Now you’ve read enough.

Selcuk Acar:
Now it’s time to take on the challenge, to actually make one. I never expected this to become a journal article. So it was a next challenge. And it doesn’t have to be that far for it to be a success. But I think by giving your students opportunities and challenges to be creative and not overly restricting those assessments, giving them some initiative, giving them some space. He didn’t tell us, study creative person or creative environment or this or that. It’s your job to identify the challenge, actually identify the gap, right? This is the challenge, and this is the gap that you have to identify. That’s just upon you.

Selcuk Acar:
I think that was one of the most fulfilling experiences for me. And all of those articles I’ve read in that class, most of them I’ve been citing because of the nature of the class, because of the conversations we have had. So I think one of the challenges here for a creative teacher instructor is that how much structure you should have. And for many K12 teachers, they may not have this luxury or option. Sometimes they have to just go with what they are given. But still, within the classroom, there are things you can do without changing the learning objectives. So after seeing that, I’m modeling some of the things I’ve learned from my professors. And each week I want my students to, as you read, ask research questions, generate hypotheses.

Selcuk Acar:
So be a proactive reader. And at the end of my seminar class, they have to actually write a project like a propos in a proposal, and some of those students actually follow up later and they become a journal article. So, but simply by challenging them appropriately and encouraging them and giving them feedback, I think such simple things can make a huge difference for creative thinking and.

Matthew Worwood:
Letting them go on their own journey as well. I mean, ultimately, I think that’s what I’m hearing with your story is that open ended experience allowed you to embark on a journey of discovery. And, and, and that’s, that’s ultimately, I think the, the big goal for every educator. And hopefully as you progress through the, the grades, it can, we can use our knowledge to hopefully make that journey more appropriate and useful for us. So we are super tight for time. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode with Selchuk Ajar, and if you do, please share it with friends or colleagues who you you think is interested in measuring creativity in the classroom. And of course, don’t forget to subscribe to our Extra Fuel newsletter and join our weekly discussions on LinkedIn. My name is Dr. Worwood

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. This episode was produced by Cindy Burnett and Matthew Warwood. Our podcast assistant is Ann Fernando and our editor is Sheikh.