How to assess creative cognition when teaching industrial design? An input for its learning

Assessing creativity in industrial design tends to focus on artifactual outcomes rather than the cognitive skills that support it, reducing the evaluative approach to an instrumental dimension. This can happen because cognition is a discrete process, which occurs in the subject's mind without being directly observable, unlike the final artifactual result. Hence the question of how to evaluate creative cognition skills in design teaching-learning processes framed in evaluation for learning. In order to respond, an assessment model was formulated to favor the teaching of creative cognition skills in project processes in industrial design, not only from a psychometric approach, but as an input to manage the teaching-learning processes. The model measured four variables characteristic of divergent thinking: fluidity, flexibility, originality and elaboration in the two phases of the design project process: problematization and ideation. This exercise made some creative cognitive skills visible by designing measurement instruments and interpreting the variables, allowing students and teachers to know their level of development, raising awareness of these skills applied to the industrial design project.