Abstract:

Topicality:
Assessment and growth of a student’s creative potential are often a desirable outcome for many teaching situations, especially in primary and secondary education. Since the introduction of skills and competence-based education system in Latvia in 2018, the ability of a student to be creative across disciplines has risen in importance. One key factor for nearly all school subjects is that students understand the fundamental key words of a class and have a broad vocabulary. The proposed methodology is innovative in Latvia and could be used internationally, too.

The aim:
The aim of this virtual presentation is to show how a targeted approach to spontaneous creativity and assessment of lexical understanding that can be used not only in art education, but interdisciplinary in relation to nearly any subject that is taught at primary and secondary school level.

Methodology:
The task – putting visual representation of lexical units such as nouns, verbs, adjectives etc in a coherent image. The students write ten words on small pieces of paper, and then each student randomly draws 10 words. With these, the student must create an image that involves all words received in the random draw. For an especially targeted approach, the teacher themselves can choose the possible words and prepare the needed number of pieces of paper, for example, words related to a certain class or study topic.
The students then proceed to create an image with color pencils or crayons on A4 sized paper, and are given a time limit to finish the task. The methodology is based on art teaching methods. The criteria for evaluation are ones many art teachers are already familiar with, such as use of perspective, composition, whether the lexical units are represented in the image drawn However, the evaluation criteria can be easily explained to a teacher of any other subject. This task does not rely on the artistic skill of the student – it is about their ability to express the semantic, literal, and symbolic aspects of the lexical units they were randomly assigned.

Data analysis:
To test the validity of the proposed methodology, two small scale trials were performed with different groups of students. One group of students was from a small, rural community in Latvia, aged 6 to 14, in total 19 students. The other test group was a sample from a more urban school, with 75 students aged 8 to 10. The rural group was given this test as part of their after-school art club, the more urban group attempted this test in an English class. These drastic differences were intentional, to show that this methodology can be applied both to small, large, urban and rural student groups as it is very flexible.
From the assessment of the urban group, none of the students showed an absolute lack of creativity, 50% of students in the urban English class showed an adequate creative result, and 13% had a very good and creative approach to their drawing. In the rural group, all students showed creativity, with 11% of them showing exceptional levels of it, and 37% had a good creative approach. This shows that students are perceptive to new methodology and all have inherent creativity.

Conclusions:
Based on student feedback, everyone enjoyed the unusual task, especially in English class, were drawing is not typical. They felt challenged to think about the meaning of the words given, and enjoyed the freedom to interpret these meanings as they pleased while drawing.

Keywords:

Creativity, vocabulary, art education, assessment, interdisciplinary, school education.