Assessing creative potential as student outcome: On the applicability of the TCT-DP in repeated measures

• Children’s creativity development has been assessed during elementary school.
• Creativity development was modeled using measurement invariance approach.
• Creativity deveploment shows to be unstable during elementary school.
• A more easy way of handling data generated by the TCT-DP is suggested.

Within a constantly changing society, the ability to act creatively in various domains is becoming increasingly important. Schools are expected to react to this by educating their students in complex problem-solving skills and creative thinking (OECD, 2014). Teachers are therefore asked to foster creativity, which implies a need to learn more about assessing creativity or creative potential. When evaluating programs that are designed to foster creativity in and out of school, it is necessary to assess creativity as a criterion, even though this is a challenging thing to do. The difficulties become particularly apparent when it comes to investigating creativity development. The present study uses the Test for Creative Thinking-Drawing Production (Urban & Jellen, 1996) to take a closer look at the measurability of creativity during childhood. German students were tested three times while at elementary school (at the beginning of the first grade and at the end of the second and fourth grade). We tested measurement equivalence and found partially strong measurement invariance in a subset of the rating categories suggested in the test’s manual. The proposed model is discussed theoretically and empirically, while keeping in mind that it is essentially a preliminary finding until replication studies have been conducted. The study indicates how creativity could be taken into account as a relevant student outcome in large-scale assessments.