Children's Self-Assessment During Creative Problem Solving

Today’s children grow up in a rapidly changing world with many uncertainties and possibilities, such as climate change, inequality, and public health crises. To help them prepare for the unknown challenges of the future, schools need to encourage creativity in children. Creativity means coming up with ideas that are both original and useful. This project is centered around creative problem solving, where children use their knowledge to find creative solutions to problems.

Creative problem solving requires children to understand the problem at hand, think of a solution, and then decide if their solution is original and useful. This final step is crucial because it helps children decide whether to keep thinking of new ideas or stop with the one they have. Unfortunately, many children either underestimate or overestimate their creative capabilities. This implies that children need different kinds of support to improve how well they assess their solutions during creative problem solving.

Teachers play an important role in helping children assess themselves accurately, but evidence-based interventions for improving self-assessment accuracy are not yet available. It is also unknown which factors are involved in how children judge their own work.

This project examines individual differences in how accurately children assess their creative problem-solving performance, and which learner characteristics explain and predict these differences. The project also explores which kinds of interventions teachers could use to help children improve their self-assessment and how these interventions can be successfully adapted to individual children’s needs. The ultimate practical goal of the project is to provide teachers with effective interventions to support children’s creative problem solving.