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Creativity has been identified as an increasingly important graduate attribute for employment in the 21st century. As sites of significant development of disciplinary specialization, universities seem to be the natural place for creativity to be fostered. However, there remain contestations and ambiguities in the ways creativity is theorized, and this translates to difficulties in operationalization, particularly in the higher education context, which attracts significantly less research than the school setting. Here, we report on interviews with physicists, historians, and poets, as both educators and producers of knowledge that progresses their disciplines, to provide elaborations on the nature of creativity. We draw on sociological theory to elucidate the characteristics of creativity as expressed by experts in particular disciplinary fields. We find that whilst perceptions appear common across the disciplines, on further analysis, they tend instead to encapsulate discrete attributes. Further, there are some qualities of creativity that are uniquely emphasized by participants in specific disciplinary fields. We argue that theorizing both the discipline and the nature of creativity together is important in order to understand how creativity might more fruitfully be discussed and fostered in higher education.

Creativity is recognised as an essential twenty-first century skill. Despite the significant volume of research on creativity, there remains considerable ambiguity in the way it is conceptualised within education. This study uses a qualitative approach to explore primary educators' (n = 9) perceptions of creativity in English, science, and history. Key questions include how creativity is conceptualised, how it manifests in the classroom and if, or how, descriptions vary across discipline areas. The results show that whilst primary educators struggle to describe creativity in the abstract, they can provide clear descriptions within their disciplinary context. Considerable differences in terms of creative thinking skills were detected in each represented discipline. In line with the literature, we suggest ways in which future research can elaborate on these creative thinking skills to reconceptualise the way creativity is developed and assessed within education.

The construction of dynamic multimedia products requires the selection and integration of a range of semiotic resources. As an assessment task for preservice teachers, this construction process is complex but has significant potential for learning. To investigate how weaving together multiple representations in such tasks enables learners to develop conceptual understanding, the paper presents an indicative case study of a 2nd-year preservice primary (K-6) teacher who created a digital explanation on the topic of 'transparency' for stage 3 children (ages 11-12). We focus on data gathered during the 3-h construction process including artefacts such as images, online searches, websites accessed and paper records used for planning; the digital explanation as product; audio and video capture of the construction process and pre- and post-construction interviews. Using multimodal analysis, we examine these data to understand how meanings are negotiated as the maker moves iteratively among multiple representations and through semiotic choices within these representations to explain the science concept. The analyses illustrate the complexity of the construction process while providing insight into the creator's decision-making and to her developing semiotic and conceptual understandings. These findings allow us to build on the concept of cumulative semiotic progression (Hoban & Nielsen, "Research in Science Education," 35, 1101-1119, 2013) by explicating the role of iterative reasoning in the production of pedagogic multimedia.

Assessments in tertiary science subjects typically assess content knowledge, and there is current need to both develop and assess different forms of knowledge and skills, such as communications and digital literacies. A digital explanation is a multimodal artefact created by students to explain science to a specified audience, which is an alternate form of assessment that has potential to develop and assess these other important forms of knowledge and skills. This research draws from perspectives in multimodality, educational semiotics and science education to gain a better understanding of digital explanation as a form of assessment in university science. Data sources include digital artefacts (n = 42), task descriptions and rubrics and pre-/post-interviews (n = 21) with students who created them as a task in a university science subject. Analysis involved identifying the range of media resources used across the data set, seeking patterns in how multiple resources were used and exploring students' perspectives on the task, including their design decisions. A more detailed look at artefacts from three different science learning contexts illustrates that students base their design decisions on the content knowledge being represented, their technical capabilities to generate them and how to engage the audience. Students enjoy this form of assessment and feel that the tasks allowed them to demonstrate different sorts of capabilities than are normally assessed in their subjects. Recommendations for instructors provide guidance for considering this sort of task in tertiary science contexts.

This paper arises from research undertaken by educational semioticians and science educators investigating the use of student generated digital artefacts as assessment tasks in pre-service science teacher education. Part of a broader shift toward student-generated media in tertiary science, the use of such tasks is driven by the need to deepen pre-service primary teachers' understandings of content and to foster enthusiasm for teaching science. However, the tasks are challenging as students must demonstrate both content and meta-semiotic knowledge in these brief digital standalone presentations. In the paper, we draw on artefacts, interviews and assessment practices to demonstrate these challenges. We identify what have emerged as key semiotic understandings necessary to complete a successful response to the task, arguing that these include multimodal understandings as well as knowledge of disciplinary specific representational practices. We describe an intervention informed by functional social semiotics and scaffolded literacy approaches with key features including use of an exemplar text for deconstruction and an explicit instructional sequence with a tailored assessment rubric. The paper reports both theoretical and practical insights and seeks to contribute to emerging analytical frameworks as well as multimodal literacy assessment.

A "digital explanation" is a science learning task where learners explain science content to non-expert others, in this case, the learners are primary preservice teachers [PST] in a science methods class. In the task, PST are assigned a prompt based on science content from the New South Wales K-6 syllabus and generate or source multiple representations to design and produce this stand-alone digital artefact. In this study, PST were interviewed about their decision making in producing the digital explanation, which offers insight into the design process and what makes for a successful product. Data include the digital explanations, interviews with nine PST, marking rubrics and rationale statements generated as part of the task. Thematic coding shows PST make design decisions for four principal reasons: content, engagement, clarity and unconscious selection. Decisions around content and engagement prevail and their decisions reveal keys to success in creating a digital explanation. We also note a tension between emphasis on engagement over content, which may reflect that the intended audience is young children and PST have a strong desire to gain and keep children's interest.