A curriculum can claim to value anything. What it actually values shows up in the rubric.
For most of my teaching career I assessed using a framework built around Studio Habits of Mind — understanding the art world, experimentation, craft, reflection. That foundation was solid. But the creativity category, what SHOM calls Envision, was the hardest to pin down. I knew I wanted to assess original thinking, but without precise graduated language, it was the category most vulnerable to subjectivity. Finding the OECD’s framework for assessing creative thinking gave me what I was missing: observable, graduated descriptors that students could actually work toward rather than an impression they were supposed to create. That one addition changed how clearly students understood what was expected of them — and how honestly I could assess it.
When I designed the assessment framework for the visual arts program at HKUGA College, I started with a question: if the curriculum is organized around thinking rather than technical skill, what does an honest rubric actually measure? The answer produced a framework built around five categories drawn directly from Harvard’s Studio Habits of Mind: understanding the art world, experimentation and risk-taking, craft, creativity, and reflection. Each one maps directly onto the behaviors the curriculum is trying to build. None of them is a proxy for talent.
The creativity category — what Studio Habits of Mind calls Envision — is worth dwelling on. Many art teachers include something called creativity in their rubrics. Survey data suggests practices vary widely: some teachers do assess creativity and reflection explicitly, while too many still rely primarily on effort, following directions, and technical finish. The word “creativity” appears on a lot of rubrics. A workable definition of it appears on far fewer.
The language I used for this category draws on OECD creativity assessment frameworks, which define creative thinking as the search for meaningful new connections — generating unusual, original, and varied possibilities. In the rubric, creativity is described in graduated, observable terms: from work that copies or restates existing sources, through work that combines images derived from other sources, to work that combines visual ideas in original ways, to work that combines them in original and surprising ways. That progression gives students something concrete to aim for rather than an impression to create — and it maps directly onto Ken Robinson’s definition that opens the year in a video students watch on their first day of class: creativity is original ideas that have value.
The research supports the difficulty of getting this right. Studies consistently find that creativity remains an ill-defined and debated concept in arts assessment, with significant misalignment between how instructors and students perceive what’s being measured. A 2024 systematic review of creative thinking in art and design education found that while originality, fluency, flexibility, and elaboration are consistently identified as core creative skills, most research has been conducted in higher education rather than secondary schools. Clear, graduated creativity criteria at secondary level are less common than the word “creativity” appearing on a rubric would suggest.
What this means in practice is that a student who arrives with limited technical confidence but genuinely original thinking can score well in the Envision category. And they should. A technically skilled student who defaults to the most obvious interpretation of a brief, executes it competently, and moves on is not demonstrating the kind of thinking the curriculum is trying to build. The rubric should reflect that distinction — and when it does, it changes the terms of success in ways that matter for every student in the room, not just the ones who arrived already confident.
This is the argument for thinking-based assessment in plain terms: if you grade primarily on technical skill, you are not measuring what you claim to be teaching. A rubric that measures experimentation, reflection, decision-making, and creative originality is harder to design and harder to explain to parents. But it’s the only kind that’s honest about what an art program built around artistic thinking is actually trying to do.
Portfolios are where this honesty becomes visible. Rather than a single final product assessed in isolation, the portfolio documents the arc of thinking across the project — sketches, material tests, failed experiments, artist research, reflections, revisions. I began thinking of the portfolio less as an archive of what students made and more as a map of decisions. Where did the student change direction? What evidence caused that change? What did the material teach them? A student who made a technically modest final piece but whose portfolio shows genuine intellectual engagement, honest reflection, and original thinking has demonstrated something more valuable than a polished outcome with no evidence of the thinking behind it.
The portfolio also changes how students approach risk. In a competitive school culture where grades carry weight, knowing that your process is visible and valued — not just your product — changes everything. If the only thing being assessed is the final piece, experimentation is dangerous. If the portfolio is part of the assessment, experimentation becomes evidence. That shift is not cosmetic. It’s the difference between a student who plays it safe and a student who is actually learning.
Assessment is not a bureaucratic obligation at the end of a project. It’s the most direct statement a curriculum makes about what it values. If we want students to think like artists — to observe carefully, experiment honestly, reflect rigorously, and produce ideas that are genuinely their own — then the rubric has to say so, in language specific enough to be meaningful and graduated enough to be fair.