Exploring alternative assessments to support digital storytelling for creative thinking in primary school classrooms

This chapter documents the use of digital storytelling as a teaching approach to facilitate the learning of creative thinking among students (aged 7 and 8) in a primary school setting. A constructive teaching approach is adopted to allow students to create their own digital stories based on an authentic experience and express their thoughts. The focus of this chapter is to show how a shift from traditional classroom assessment to more flexible, alternative assessment format facilitates higher level thought processes (e.g., creative thinking) and range of skills. Several issues and challenges of using alternative assessment in digital storytelling are explored and discussed. Findings suggest that digital storytelling may be effectively used as an approach to foster creative thinking. They also suggest that refinements to the assessment process are needed to make it more formative in nature. Copyright © 2011 Information Science Reference.