ABSTRACT
In an environment where educational decision makers are calling for more and more standardized assessments backed by explicitly defined criteria and assessment procedures, music teachers are often hard pressed to find a way to explain their rationale for assessing their students the way they do. This can be difficult due to the lack of a standardized definition of creativity in education and how to fairly rate the creativity of a product. One solution is the Consensual Assessment Technique first described by Teresa M. Amabile (1982). She offers a definition of creativity that “implicitly underlies most subjective creativity assessment methodologies.” According to Amabile, “a product or response is creative to the extent that appropriate observers independently agree it is creative. Appropriate observers are those familiar with the domain in which the product was created or the response articulated. Thus, creativity can be regarded as the quality of products or responses judged to be creative by appropriate observers, and it can also be regarded as the process by which something so judged is produced” (p. 998). Amabile’s approach could be a potential solution in assessing creativity in multiple arts domains, particularly at institutions requiring that assessments be made on students’ creative work.
