CAP: The creativity assessment platform for online testing and automated scoring.

Journal: Behavior research methods
Published Date: Aug 18, 2025

Abstract

Creativity is increasingly recognized as a core competency for the 21st century, making its development a priority in education, research, and industry. To effectively cultivate creativity, researchers and educators need reliable and accessible assessment tools. Recent software developments have significantly enhanced the administration and scoring of creativity measures; however, existing software often requires expertise in experiment design and computer programming, limiting its accessibility to many educators and researchers. In the current work, we introduce CAP-the Creativity Assessment Platform-a free web application for building creativity assessments, collecting data, and automatically scoring responses (cap.ist.psu.edu). CAP allows users to create custom creativity assessments in ten languages using a simple, point-and-click interface, selecting from tasks such as the Short Story Task, Drawing Task, and Scientific Creative Thinking Test. Users can automatically score task responses using machine learning models trained to match human creativity ratings-with multilingual capabilities, including the new Cross-Lingual Alternate Uses Scoring (CLAUS), a large language model achieving strong prediction of human creativity ratings in ten languages. CAP also provides a centralized dashboard to monitor data collection, score assessments, and automatically generate text for a Methods section based on the study's tasks, metrics, and instructions-with a single click-promoting transparency and reproducibility in creativity assessment. Designed for ease of use, CAP aims to democratize creativity measurement for researchers, educators, and everyone in between.

Authors

  • John D Patterson
    Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA. jpttrsn@psu.edu.
  • Jimmy Pronchick
    Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, 140 Moore Building, University Park, PA, 16802, USA.
  • Ruchi Panchanadikar
    School of Computing, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA.
  • Mark Fuge
    Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, ETH Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland.
  • Janet G van Hell
    Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, 140 Moore Building, University Park, PA, 16802, USA.
  • Scarlett R Miller
    Pennsylvania State University Industrial Engineering.
  • Dan R Johnson
    Department of Cognitive and Behavioral Science, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA, USA.
  • Roger E Beaty
    Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA.

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