Imagination has made headlines recently, lauded the # 1 profession skill of the future. Yet teachers and social scientists have struggled to discover an objective way to study creativity. Now, researchers at Florida State University think they have discovered a method to objectively test for characteristics connected with imagination. Their more accurate and objective measurement tool? Video video games. Particularly, stealth evaluation embedded in a computer game. Their findings are published this month in the journal Computer systems in Human Habits.
What is stealth assessment in video games?
Stealth assessment is performance-based screening embedded into academic video games. It permits a researcher or instructor to gather information on gamers’ actions and measure and evaluate players’ efficiency in real-time. Stealth evaluation is acquiring popularity as a tool to test hard-to-get-at human abilities.
“For a long period of time, scientists on imagination have said that it’s hard to determine creativity, it’s subjective [and] that we must drop objectivity in the evaluation of creativity,” says the research study’s co-author and post-doctoral researcher, Seyedahmad Rahimi. He adds that as far as he knows this is “the very first time that we are assessing imagination automatically, in real-time, without the intervention of human judgment.”
Along with objective measurement, real-time measurement allowed the researchers to observe particular clinically evasive yet vital elements of the imaginative procedure, like creative flow. Circulation is a state where you’re in the zone, where time and self-consciousness appear to vanish because you’re so fully and exhilaratingly immersed in the innovative process. “Flow is where all the enjoyment enters into gameplay, and it’s likewise where a great deal of learning happens,” states Valerie Shute, Campbell-Tyner Endowed Teacher of Education and lead author of the research study.
Reining in creativity to measure it
If you wish to study something utilizing the scientific approach, you not only need an objective tool for determining, you initially require to know what you want to determine. Most of us understand imagination when we see it in others or experience it ourselves. The obstacle is developing the meaning of imagination inclusive of its required and sufficient conditions so that general insights can be obtained from a study. Psychologists fiercely debate the meaning of imagination, but most settle on its basic homes: imagination involves ideas or options and works/products that are unique, appropriate and/or efficient. For the functions of this study, imagination is specified as: “The capability to produce solutions and concepts that are novel and efficient,” states Shute.
The study
Study participants were 167 8th and 9th graders (76 male and 91 female between the ages of 13-15 years old) from a K-12 school in Florida. The kids played a computer game Physics Playground, where they used a mouse or stylus to draw items that came to life within the video game and communicated with other things. Gamers had the ability to use ramps, levers, pendulums, and springboards to steer a green ball and a red balloon through a digital environment that mirrored laws of physics in the real world. Trainees were checked prior to and after gameplay. They were evaluated based on the innovative ways they got the green ball and red balloon to move from Point A to Point B in a digital challenge course.
Children were also able to design their levels of the game. Instructions motivated them to come up with additional “awesome” options of their own styles. The student-created levels were graded by two “raters” trained in the rubric for this study. For example, aspects of creativity like humor (if the level made the rater smile), surprise, and “aesthetic appeal” made kids more points for their levels. Yet if a kid crafted an extremely innovative yet unsolvable level, they received no points. In truth, the only way for kids to score an absolutely no was if the level was unsolvable. Students were awarded gold and silver coins within the game and were provided $25 gift cards for getting involved.
The results
Shute and Rahimi operationalized creativity and utilized stealth assessment to effectively measure it throughout three main measurements.
- Fluency: Can you conceptualize a range of ways to tackle a creative task?
- Creativity: How novel or different is the work?
- Versatility: Can you easily pivot?
The research study results appear to validate stealth evaluation in video games as a promising new tool in a creativity research study. In fact, one location where their study stopped working to produce a substantial connection was in an openness survey. This was a stage of the research study that did not include stealth evaluation however instead counted on the more traditional yet infamously biased means of determining imagination: through survey-based self-reporting.
When it comes to finding out retention and whether computer games can improve creativity, the findings were less definitive. So although Shute and Rahimi are encouraged by the outcomes, they wish to see their approaches used in a lengthy longitudinal study, inclusive of pre and posttest procedures of knowledge and creativity, to acquire insights that weren’t possible to observe in a half dozen 45-minute sessions over the course of a week.
Taking threats
Much of the scientific literature points to a positive connection between creativity and the desire to take risks and fail. The scientists struck on another benefit to using stealth assessment in video games to assess imagination: a desire to run the risk of stopping working is normally prevented in school and the workplace, but it is motivated in a computer game. Can computer games sharpen creative abilities more so than the conventional scholastic environment? Shute responds definitively: “Yes. With 47 exclamation points.”
Is creativity about problem-solving?
For the purposes of testing creativity more rigorously, scientists frequently specify imagination in an ‘analytical’ context, and this study is no exception. Shute mentions that a game-based environment demands analytical. But defining imagination as problem-solving leaves out legions of highly imaginative individuals and works. Jazz legend John Coltrane’s jazz improvisations are arguably the height of imaginative expression. To call what Coltrane did ‘problem-solving’ extends the significance of this meaning to the verge of meaninglessness. Still, scientific designs may need a solution-based definition of creativity for the purposes of measurement. The question is, will the pursuit of a more objective method of measurement lead to researchers puzzling measurement criteria with the thing being measured? And could we be confronted with a major compromise in an imagination research study? The better we get at rigorously studying particular aspects of imaginative problem-solving or “relevant” or “proper” creativity for the functions of mentor and rewarding it, the greater the possibility we conscript imagination to a narrow definition, perhaps restricting what expressions of imagination we as a society deem important and desire to motivate, teach, and support.
While video games appear to be a more unbiased way of evaluating aspects of imagination like problem-solving, fluency, creativity, versatility and circulation, the researchers understand the limitations fundamental in imagination tests and tests in general. A previous primary research study researcher at Educational Testing Service (ETS), Shute has appointments about the weight we traditionally put on tests as a means of assessing human abilities: “I personally think that people are a lot more than single ratings on fricking tests.”