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11am-12pm first Fridays US Pacific Time June 05 2020 Episode 1 of Creativity in Crisis: Prisoners of Our Own Imagination

As creativity becomes an increasing significant attribute/ability for students today, there is an increasing call for assessment. Is it possible to assess creativity? Are there any creativity assessments that have TRULY the power to predict individuals’ creativity capacity in the future? Are there any meaningful ways to assess creativity that is actually productive?

Furthermore, as schools and education systems began to struggle with creativity assessment, large international organizations such as the OECD has also begun to seriously consider creativity as an important educational outcomes. OECD’s Program for International Students Assessment (PISA) has announced that it will start creativity assessment in 2021. If you are curious, here is the 2021 PISA Creative Thinking Framework.

So, our first episode of Creativity in Crisis: Prisoners of Our Own Imagination is about creativity assessment. We will explore two large issues:

1. What are the potential promises and pitfall of large scale creativity assessment of school-age children (e.g., PISA Creativity Assessment)?
2. Even if we can assess creativity using international comparative assessments, should we?

Joining us are two scholars who are certainly more than qualified to explore the questions: James C. Kaufman and Bill Lucas.

James C. Kaufman is a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut. He is the author/editor of more than 35 books, including Creativity 101 (2^nd Edition, 2016) and the Cambridge Handbook of Creativity (2nd Edition, 2019; with Robert Sternberg). He has published more than 300 papers, including the study that spawned the “Sylvia Plath Effect,” and three well-known theories of creativity, including (with Ron Beghetto) the Four-C Model of Creativity. He is a past president of Division 10 of the American Psychological Association. James has won many awards, including Mensa’s research award, the Torrance Award from the National Association for Gifted Children, and APA’s Berlyne and Farnsworth awards. He co-founded two major journals (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts and Psychology of Popular Media Culture). He has tested Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s creativity on CNN, appeared in the hit Australia show Redesign Your Brain, and narrated the comic book documentary Independents. He wrote the book and lyrics to Discovering Magenta, which had its NYC premiere in 2015.