Designing a Creativity Assessment Tool for the Twenty-First Century: Preliminary Results and Insights from Developing a Design-Thinking Based Assessment of Creative Capacity

In order to assess a person’s creative capacity in real-world situations, we propose a novel Design Thinking Creativity Test (DTCT). The DTCT is based on the design thinking principles and can serve as an assessment that reflects problem-solving needs of the twenty-first century. In particular, the DTCT emphasizes assessment of case-based skills to directly measure an individual’s application of creativity during an innovation event. In order to create a robust and standardized creativity assessment, we are currently examining (1) the reliability of DTCT in capturing applied creativity in a simulated real-world setting; (2) the validity of DTCT by relating DTCT scores with other standardized assessments of creativity; and (3) the correlations between neuroimaging data and scores achieved in the DTCT task. In this chapter, we provide a thorough background on already existing tools to assess creative capacity and how our approach advances the current state of the art. We also share challenges faced in collecting and analyzing DTCT data, along with proposed solutions. Lastly, we provide our hypotheses and preliminary insights regarding DTCT’s ability to capture applied creative capacity.