The culture of competition and assessment in education promotes a narrow
focus on convergent teaching and learning that can suppress creative thinking.
Newsweek recently declared that a creativity crisis is looming (Anon. 2010). A
study involving the analysis of almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and
adults in the US found creativity scores, like IQ scores, have been steadily
rising until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have been declining consistently,
notably for children from kindergarten through sixth grade (Kim 2011).
But research has demonstrated that creativity is a robust human trait, and it is
possible for students to bounce back from creativity-stifling school and classroom
practices (Beghetto 2010). Research has also found that arts teachers
may need professional development to be better informed of recent developments
pertaining to creativity, arts pedagogy and arts assessment. A survey
study of 330 arts teachers found about 40 per cent not being sure whether or
not developing students’ creativity was one of their key responsibilities and
had difficulty expressing themselves creatively in the arts. Over 40 per cent
were not able to indicate if they should give marks for students’ non-standard
answers and about the same number were not able to indicate whether or not
creativity can be developed in group settings, and whether or not creativity is
better developed individually (Leong and Qiu 2013)