Assessing Creative Awareness and Literary Writing Games in the Norwegian Context

Abstract

This paper reports on a survey and teaching intervention done with Norwegian students in their first (VG1), second (VG2), and third year (VG3) of high school English (16-19 years old). The goals of the project: 1. To examine Norwegian student/teacher attitudes toward creativity; 2. To design, play-test, and asses creative reading games. The study found students surprisingly open to creativity and games in education, however, there was a general wariness of assessment. As the students progressed through high school, they increasingly saw writing as something one is forced to do, and resisted sharing their writing. Almost all students saw themselves as outside the community of writers. While the novel nature of the games made for initial difficulties, this was also a motivator. The key to effectiveness was pairing theory with practice to give students a clear sense of the pedagogical goal: to develop and experience the use of creativity (divergent thinking). The use of multimodality in games (drawing) was immensely effective for student engagement and collaboration; however, it was less effective in terms of maintaining clear pedagogical goals in the time given. Finally, the most effective approach in terms of engagement was to involve students as game designers. This paper will focus on a presentation of student views on creativity followed by an assessment of the game results in light of these views.