Computer-Based Creative Thinking Assessment of Schoolchildren without Expert Involvement

Psychology. Journal of the Higher School of Economics. 2025. Vol. 22. No. 2. P. 339–361.

Uglanova I., Tarasov S., Churbanova S., Orel E.

Тhe importance of creativе thinking was highlighted in the modern world by including it into the lists of 21st century skills and educational objective into the national curriculums. To make creativity assessment more widespread in school and educational research, it is necessary to diminish the resource-intensity of the assessment for both educators and students. In modern psychometrics, one of the urgent questions of creativity assessment is the automatic scoring of product outcomes. The automatic scoring increases the potential of scaling up since it does not depend on working hours of human raters and eliminates the bias due to experts’ subjectivity. Automatic scoring goes along with computer-based assessment. The aim of this research is to present the methodology of computer-based creative thinking assessment without human-based ratings. We follow evidence-centered design framework and describe the proficiency model, which is based on the cognitive approach and the concept of structural imagination, and the task models for computer-based assessment with automated scoring. In the empirical part, the factor structure of the tool was shown on a sample of 749 5th-grade students. We discuss the benefits of the proposed approach, such as an increase in ecological validity and a decrease in experts’ efforts. The practical significance is the decrease in workload in creativity assessment in classroom conditions using IT.

Keywords: компьютерное тестирование, creative thinking, креативное мышление, экологическая валидность, ecological validity, evidence-centered design, метод доказательной аргументации, computer-based assessment