Creativity and Feedback: Designing Systems to Support Student Learning and Improve Instruction

This chapter provides a historical perspective on the concept of creativity and its relationship to the development of education theory during the first half of the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century, creativity had a very specific meaning, which expanded in the mid- to late twentieth century into a more general, and in our view less useful, meaning. These two perspectives are linked to two conflicting educational theories, represented by Edward Lee Thorndike and John Dewey. Dewey described learning as a natural part of being an inquiring human being in a social and physical world, whereas Thorndike's view was more reductionist, based on stimulus–response connections. The Thorndike's theory gained prominence and still dominates today, over the Deweyan theory, due in part to the ease with which it can be experimentally tested.

Ideas are developed into a two-part manifesto to inform teaching practice and the development of education technology. The first part delineates the conditions for creative feedback in social learning and encapsulates a Deweyan educational approach. The second part describes the characteristics of education technology that can be used to experiment with creative feedback and social learning, and establishes how we can begin to validate experimentally the Deweyan theory of education.

Interactive task learning considers the challenge of interactively training bots to carry out a task. This chapter is most relevant to medium-term and future tasks for bots within a social context involving humans and bots, and may offer subjective or dynamic evaluation criteria. Bot instructors working with these types of tasks may benefit from considering the complexity and nuances of creative feedback.