A NEW Approach to Defining and Measuring Creativity: Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century

Justice Potter Stewart of the Supreme Court when attempting to define pornography famously said: “I know it when I see it.” This definition (or acknowledgement of the difficulty of constructing a definition) is similar to the way we often think about creativity. The idea that creativity defies definition, and yet is recognizable, speaks to the ineffable yet self-evident magic that seems to underlie the creative spark. As creativity becomes an important part of education, however, it is imperative that we move beyond such generalizations towards a more precise definition. Such a definition would provide multiple benefits. First, it would allow us to develop a shared understanding of this important construct, and second, we could, given this shared understanding, begin to develop more precise evaluations of it. These twin goals (of definition and evaluation) are important as we think about the role of creativity in teaching and learning. Over the past few issues of this journal, we have been exploring the importance of creativity in 21st century learning from a variety of perspectives: as framed by the imperatives of technology (Mishra & the Deep-Play Research Group, 2012), 21st century learning environments (Mishra, Fahnoe, & Henriksen, 2013), and the trans-disciplinary nature of knowledge in STEM and other disciplines (Mishra, Henriksen, & the Deep-Play Research Group; Mishra, Terry, Henriksen, & the Deep-Play Research Group, 2013; Mishra, Yadav, & the Deep-Play Research Group, 2013). What we haven’t done, however, is define (as precisely as possible given the complexity of the term) what it is that we mean when we say that something is creative (be it an idea or an artifact or a solution to a problem). We have assumed that we are all speaking in the same terms when we use the word “creativity” and that we all agree on how we assess something as being creative. Of course, our assumption is just that, a presupposition that may be not grounded in reality. Thus, in this paper we seek to provide a definition of creativity, and in turn offer an example of an ongoing research project in which this definition is being used to develop rubrics for evaluating the products of the creative process.