Switching on the creativity gene: a co-creation assessment initiative in a large first year genetics course

Creativity is an important twenty-first century skill often overlooked in higher education curricula, particularly in the sciences. Students need opportunities to practice and demonstrate their creativity and gain an awareness of the importance of such skills to enhance their graduate capabilities. One way is to embed creativity into course assessment and link it to an employability context. This article describes how we used a staff-student co-creation framework to develop a group project assessment task encouraging 400+ first-year online students to express their creativity and demonstrate graduate attributes. We were also interested in students' perspectives of empowerment, collegiality and authenticity. Our findings indicate the task enabled student groups to generate a diverse array of creative educational products for varied audiences. Most students valued the opportunity to express their creativity and were able to see the connection with creativity and other soft skills along with future opportunities and achievements. The group work aspects of the task helped many students feel connected to their peers and in control of their assessment. Students perceived that this assessment task reflected multiple aspects of authenticity. We demonstrate co-created creative assessment can be undertaken in large first year science classes to facilitate student learning and capability development.