Radical rubrics: implementing the critical and creative thinking general capability through an ecological approach

Radical rubrics: implementing the critical and creative thinking general capability through an ecological approach

This article details how and why we have developed a flexible and responsive pro- cess-based rubric exemplar for teaching, learning, and assessing critical and creative thinking. We hope to contribute to global discussions of and efforts toward instru- mentalising the challenge of assessing, but not standardising, creativity in compul- sory education. Here, we respond to the key ideas of the four interrelated elements in the critical and creative thinking general capability in the Australian Curriculum learning continuum: inquiring; generating ideas, possibilities, actions; reflecting on thinking processes; and analysing, synthesising and evaluating reasoning and proce- dures. The rubrics, radical because they privilege process over outcome, have been designed to be used alongside the current NAPLAN tests in Years 5, 7 and 9 to build an Australian-based national creativity measure. We do so to argue the need for local and global measures of creativity in education as the first round of testing and results of the PISA Assessment of Creative Thinking approach and to contribute to the recognition of creative thinking (and doing) as a core twenty-first century lit- eracy alongside literacy and numeracy.