Introduction
One of the least understood aspects of critical thinking is its relationship to creative thinking. On reflection, most would agree that critical thinking manifests itself — perhaps most completely — in creative thinking. But the nature of creative thinking is elusive and poorly understood. Though the critical thinking movement has spawned extensive literature on the nature, teaching, and assessment of critical thinking, this is a literature that, for the most part, ignores the relationship between creative and critical thinking.
To some extent, our failure to fully come to terms with creative thinking may be inevitable; creativity by nature is an elusive phenomenon that breaks free of the established standards of thinking and reasoning. Because creativity is most often conceived of as invention, then perhaps it is a cognitive activity that must necessarily reach beyond the structure of what has been studied and written about. The theoretical and pedagogical questions that this raises are particularly acute in the area of assessment, especially standardized assessment, because it seems impossible to develop answer keys to capture the range of answers under the umbrella “all answers imaginable.” It is relatively easy to see whether students can detect standard logical or linguistic flaws in a piece of reasoning, but far more difficult to assess whether they are capable of developing new ways of looking at things, and to then score them according to that “newness” or on some scale of imagination. To do so seems counterintuitive.
More deeply, one might wonder whether the unimaginative exercise of the rote skills emphasized on most standardized tests encourages habits of thinking which are, by their nature, not free and creative. With this consideration to mull over, creative thinking seems untestable by, and in fact seems bound by, this and almost any other testing format (most notably, the ubiquitous multiple-choice question).
The chapters in Part Two of the book address this very issue: how the creative aspect of a critical thinking process might best be taught and assessed. In Chapter Five, William Hare argues that the importance of imagination has been overlooked in discussions of critical thinking, and promotes a view of teaching and critical thinking which is squarely founded on a belief in imagination and the openness and creativity it encompasses. In Chapter Six, Jan Sobocan examines the format of the The Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test and discusses whether or not this particular instrument solicits any creative thinking skills that would be considered higher-order thinking as outlined in The Ontario Curriculum documents that supplement the test. More generally, she considers how tests might more validly assess the creative components of a critical thinking process.
