Assessing Creative Thinking in Argumentative Discourse: Criteria and Diagnostic Tools

This paper examines criteria and diagnostic tools for assessing creative thinking in argumentative discourse. Creative thinking is operationalised through Torrance’s four indices of fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. In addition, two argumentation-related dimensions are incorporated: problem finding, understood as the ability to identify what is genuinely at issue in a motion, and perspective flexibility, or the ability to reason from a position that one does not personally hold. Each dimension is linked to observable learner discourse during debate. The study proposes a Creative Argumentation Performance Rubric comprising five dimensions: ideational fluency, conceptual flexibility, originality, elaboration, and evidential grounding. The paper also emphasises the importance of assessing creative thinking separately from general oral proficiency in order to avoid interpreting increased speaking fluency as evidence of increased creativity. The proposed set of instruments includes an analytic rubric, open-ended verbal divergent-thinking tasks, and a learner questionnaire. This approach makes it possible to distinguish between improvements in language performance and actual changes in creative thinking, thereby providing a more precise basis for evaluating the effects of debate-based instruction.