A holistic look at creativity: evaluating pupils’ creative design ideation and prototypes through comparative judgment

Abstract

Developing creative solutions to improve our surroundings is a key 21st-century competency. Design & Technology (D&T) education presents valuable opportunities to teach creativity as a skill. However, the ill-defined and context-dependent nature of design problems often makes it challenging for educators to adequately evaluate the creativity demonstrated in pupils’ solutions. Comparative judgment, which does not rely on a predetermined set of evaluative criteria, offers an alternative approach. In this study, we leveraged this method to investigate how 20 industrial design students, acting as judges, holistically assessed design ideas and prototypes produced by 201 pupils aged 10 to 14 in the Netherlands. Although creativity is acknowledged as central to design quality, it is not prioritized in many current D&T projects. To address this gap, we deliberately focused on evaluating the creativity evident in pupils’ designs. We further explored how judges’ evaluative considerations, coded as criteria, shifted from the beginning to the end of the comparative judgment process. Our findings from qualitative and quantitative analyses added to our understanding of the multifaceted process of evaluating creativity and provided practical insights into using comparative judgment as an assessment tool in design education.