Educating For Creativity in Narrative Writing: Constructing a Framework For Assessment and Feedback

Abstract

Creativity is frequently discussed as a desirable outcome in modern education. Writing is one key area where childhood creativity manifests, due to its generative nature and the repertoire of possibilities it affords. Previous trials for introducing creativity into the writing classroom, however, have highlighted the complications caused by differing conceptions of creativity, as well as the importance of effective formative feedback. In response to these considerations, this study provides an evidence-based understanding of what characterises creativity in children’s writing and an accompanying framework for formative assessment.

This 3-year research project was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and continued the partnership between the University of Exeter and the Arvon Foundation. It addressed questions of what we value in creative texts, how children’s creativity is defined, and how formative feedback can be improved in the writing classroom by capturing perceptions of children’s narrative creativity. The research involved a systematic literature review and a mixed-methods approach to eliciting where creativity lay in children’s stories. 49 participants – fiction writers, university creative writing tutors, and classroom teachers – provided ratings of writing samples and offered insights through semi-structured interviews.

Six key thematic categories were illuminated through this process: management of the reader’s attention, meaning-making, narrative crafting, the writer as a child, imaginative development, and conceptual divergence. This taxonomy capturing what these experts valued was used to articulate a research-based definition of creativity in children’s writing as a type of engaging and novel meaning-making, and to design a feedback rubric that can be piloted in writing classrooms. The second phase of the project sought to develop the dimensions of these categories, to capture their interrelationships, and to operationalise findings for use in the everyday writing classroom.