Representing knowledge: Assessment of creativity in humanities

Abstract

Traditionally, assessment for university students in the humanities has been in an essay format, but this has changed extensively in the last decade. Assessments now may entail auditory and visual presentations, films, mind-maps, and other modes of communication. These formats are outside the established conventions of humanities and may be considered as creative works. Exploring definitions and research in the field of assessment of creativity, highlighting ways to explicitly assess the creative aspects of student work. An obligatory first year common unit titled “Cultural intelligence and capability” is examined as a model of how creative assessment can be used to extend engagement with subject material. Implications of considering creative aspects, in an explicit way, are reviewed. The underpinning argument is that in the current learning settings, creativity should be seen as an intrinsic part of appraisal criteria in the humanities as much as in the arts.

Determining and Prioritizing the Evaluation Criteria of Humanities Scientific Outputs: A Case Study of Language and Literature Fields

“…A review of the literature shows that studies on the evaluation of humanities research have adopted a descriptive approach to investigate issues such as: publishing behavior of researchers, research and citation databases analysis, [34] citation analysis, [35,36] core sources, [37] thematic trend of research, [38] drawing of a map of science, [39] review of journals, articles, books, and dissertations, [40] metadata analysis of information resources, [41] performance of researchers and faculty members, [42] research visibility, [43] and creativity measurement. [44] In the aforesaid works, there are deficiencies in the evaluation of humanities research, as humanities are generally not differentiated from other sciences and a similar approach has been used to evaluate and compare all the fields disregarding their specific characteristics and nature. Some studies have pointed to the special evaluation of the humanities research, but have not elaborated any further on the way of this evaluation.…”