Policy makers and educators have emphasized the many promising features of technology education (TE) as a vehicle for the development of creativity. Design and technology are, in essence, manifestations of human creativity; educated designers display a high ability in seeing possibilities, discovering problems, branching out, and inventing (Facaoaru, 1985) skills everybody should master in the future.
It is, however, not easy for teachers and learners to know what creativity is and how to develop it. Assessment of creativity is particularly challenging because it is one of the areas of human affairs where we cannot write down rules for what makes something good. In addition, when products have a ground-breaking novelty, criteria to judge their relevance do not yet exist but have to be developed alongside.
Therefore, objective assessment - in the sense of using preset criteria - is not possible. To direct learning processes, teachers and students need ways to share personal perceptions of quality. This improves their understanding of creativity and to know where to go next. Formative assessment is most suitable for the assessment of creativity.
Formative assessment can focus on the (creative) processes, products, personal styles, and the context. For each angle, an overview of existing ways to assess creativity in various research traditions is given. The four angles will enrich each other and ideally TE teachers integrate them. Ways to formatively assess at the personal and context level are relevant but scarce.