Teagle Creativity and Critical Thinking Assessment

A professor consults with two students during class

A multi-year project funded by the Teagle Foundation explored the effectiveness of a liberal arts education to foster creative and critical thinking. The Five Colleges of Ohio Creative and Critical Thinking Project focused on developing tools to assess two fundamental and related outcomes of a liberal arts education: creativity and critical thinking. This project built upon the results of two “First-Step” workshops, which were funded by a Teagle-funded pilot grant in 2005-06. Using primary trait analysis (PTA), this collaboration foregrounds the belief that tools designed to assess student learning in these areas will allow us to measure the distinctive educational gains that a liberal arts education provides.