Objective: This study examines the validity of Amabile's (1982) consensual assessment technique in measuring creativity in a warm-up activity in fourth-grade drama classrooms and compares the scores between warm-ups occurring in a blackbox theater setting (experimental) vs. a traditional classroom (control). Method: Four professional actors viewed 60 clips of children's drama warm-ups and scored for creativity, using a 5-point scale. After establishing sufficient inter-rater reliability (IRR), we used the average scores of the raters to compare creativity between the experimental and control groups. Results: The raters demonstrated high agreement, with a coefficient alpha estimate of .819. An independent samples t-test between the experimental and control groups was significant at p < .001, with the experimental group receiving higher scores. Conclusions: The results suggested that creativity was significantly higher in the experimental group, and the context correlated with creativity, despite neither group having yet received drama instruction at that time. This paper presents discussions about validity, opinions of the raters, possible implications for the activity itself, and possible effect of setting on creativity.

Establishing what constitutes creativity in a domain is something for which we often look to expertsindividuals versed in a domain's history and able to identify timeworn ideas from fresh ones. Such valuations of creative merit are tied to a familiarity with past and present trends and, therefore, opinions of newcomers are often ignored. However, what about domains that build upon new, unexplored practices? This study examines the creativity ratings of judges with varying expertise in the emergent domain of electronic textiles (or e-textiles). E-textiles are fabrics that have programmable electronics such as sensors and actuators embedded in them toward a variety of expressive and functional ends. Judges included domain pioneers ("experts"), individuals with over 20 hr of nonprofessional experience in the domain ("quasi-experts"), and individuals untrained in the domain ("novices"). Each group evaluated the creativity of e-textile artifacts from an online gallery using the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT). Our analyses found high interjudge reliability within all groups and between quasiexperts and experts, suggesting that quasi-experts could be sufficiently trained to judge the creativity of artifacts on par with experts. Furthermore, larger panels of novice judges may serve as an alternative, but it would be with the caveat that novice scores represent the opinions of general audiences that might not understand technical practices of e-textiles. Findings offer alternative considerations for how creativity is assessed in emergent, technology-rich domains and have implications for judge recruitment.

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