Evaluating Student's Creative Thinking in STEAM Education: Model Construction and Validation

Effective and feasible evaluation of students’ creative thinking is crucial for STEM education. The study considers the essential characteristics of STEAM and the core concept, pays attention to PISA-style assessment to set up the evaluation framework. We run two rounds of Delphi consultation and adopt the Analytic Hierarchy Process to determine evaluation index weights. The Evaluation Index System of Student's Creative Thinking in STEAM Education is constructed and contains the Generate Diverse Ideas, Generate Creative Ideas, Generate Precise Ideas, Evaluate and Improve Ideas of 4 level indicators and 12 secondary indicators. The results show that the index system has good credibility (Cronbach's α=0.993) and rationality (KMO=0.97). Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the indexes fit well. Among the four dimensions, the Evaluate and Improve Ideas were weighted largest, second to Generate Diverse Ideas and Generate Creative ideas, Generated Precise Ideas were weighted minimum. The index system can comprehensively evaluate the aspects of students' creative thinking in STEAM education, which provide reference and a necessary tool for STEAM educational evaluation.