Can elementary school teachers assess students’ creative problem solving abilities?

The extent to which teacher assessments reflect students' abilities in creative problem solving, i.e., the ability to produce original, complete, and practical ideas, was examined. 610 Dutch students from 4th to 6th grade were assessed with two tasks. The alignment between teachers (N = 26) and trained raters (N = 2) was studied for both absolute assessments and the relative ordering of students' scores. The main finding of this study was that elementary school teachers were able to assess creative problem solving in a relative way. Teachers' creative problem solving assessments were not affected by students' gender or academic achievement.