KAREN PEARLMAN — In response to the exciting discussion of an Evaluation Framework for the Creative Arts in a university context, I write to contribute the ‘Assessment Criteria for Creative Practice Research’ below, preceded by some background and a few discussion points.
Background
These ‘Assessment Criteria for Creative Practice Research’ began being written (and re-written) by me after my first year serving on the creative practice research verification sub-committee of Macquarie University. They were, in part, designed to be fit for use by a dynamic mix of practices represented on the committee: creative researchers from music, screen, theatre, dance, fiction and creative non-fiction and more, alongside deputy deans and departmental or school ‘directors of research’, who are generally scholars in disciplines producing expository or philosophical work.1 I have now served on this committee for close to 5 years and am finding, as its composition continuously shifts and changes, that these criteria continue to be useful for clarifying committee discussions as well as for guiding creative practice researchers making submissions to the committee.
Discussion
A few notes about these guidelines in the context of this discussion:
First, while they do not explicitly state that art/creative practice can generate insight and understanding (‘knowledge’), they are based on that premise.2 Thus, their function is not so much to make that case as it is to make a translation from one set of concerns or vocabularies (those that inform the generation of creative practice research outputs) to the systems of measurement on which the university relies for capturing information about the research being generated.
This translation, or what my colleague, filmmaker and ARC Future Fellow Prof. Tom Murray calls ‘languaging’, is the key here, and brings me to the second point of interest: when I introduced these guidelines to a colleague working outside of a creative practice discipline who was on the ARC college of experts at the time, she said, roughly, ‘these are exactly what the ARC needs’.
The significance of this comment is, in part, obvious: while the ARC has clear metrics for measuring quality and amounts of expository or philosophical outputs, it does not, according to this insider on the process, have similarly clear and specific measuring systems for artistic works. We know this, of course, hence this discussion within the DDCA.
The other significance of my colleague’s comment is that it demonstrates that this framework is not just desired by CPR academics, but by the assessors who are tasked with making decisions about work outside their own area of expertise.
My colleague is a scholar committed to research and teaching for reasons to do with contributing to and participating in human and more-than-human flourishing. She is not, in other words, a system, an institution, a set of assumptions, regulations or profit motives. Thus, keeping her individual good intentions in mind when considering how to sustain the flourishing of creative practice research in the larger institutional context may be a useful strategy here.
The guidelines below are partially in response to this. They are a ‘bottom up’ incursion into the discussion, aiming to be a functional translation tool to support well-intentioned assessors who need a framework for understanding work that uses methods and produces outputs so distinct from their own. The language and structure of the guidelines aims to offer a tool or evaluation method that aligns sufficiently well with existing structures to make them viable for creative practice, even as this work sits within somewhat intractable institutional ideologies. This ‘micro-level’ strategy is premised on the idea that well-meaning individuals at all levels of the university and funding institutions may be open to enhancing their structures and skills by broadening their evaluation criteria but may not yet have compatible ‘languaging’ tools for doing so.
Below are the ever-evolving, imperfect, and probably not perfectible set of criteria. They ask about things that are, with practice, ‘knowable’ by artists, and try to break that knowing down into bite-sized chunks so as to elucidate it without requiring any dismantling of ‘the ambiguous, the unsayable, or the mysterious’ (Glisovic. 24 June 2025).
Given that many institutions have similar implicit or explicit guidelines, I note that one criterion we have found particularly useful in our committee discussions is #3 which provides language for recognition of creative practice as research when it is research generating knowledge, insight, or understanding through form, process, or aesthetic achievement or when it is generative of knowledge about something in the world, or when it is doing both. I welcome discussion of this or any other of these criteria as part of the DDCA’s admirable efforts to collect, analyse, reconcile and distribute and establish a National Creative Research Evaluation Framework.
Assessment Criteria for Creative Practice Research
This list is intended to provide clear but not rigid ways of thinking about creative practice research. A work may have one or more of these things; it will not have all, nor does it need to. Research verification statements should respond to questions about the research investigation, contribution, and significance. The first two criteria are primarily to assist in determining the number of research active points to be allocated once the work is verified.
1) Duration or size of output
2) Effort and duration of process (including, e.g. fieldwork, archival research, or production processes)
Context, question/investigation
3) Research problem and question or investigation clarity:
- Is the research seeking knowledge of creative practice, e.g. knowledge of process, form, technologies, techniques, or artistic strategies for addressing aesthetic problems?
- And/or is the research seeking to generate knowledge of something other than creative practice which can only be secured through creative practice, i.e. knowledge in history, anthropology, gender studies, law, medical or natural sciences?
4) Is the research framework, theoretical basis or creative practice context for the research clearly articulated?
5) Research investigation depth: Depth of investigation of a question/sub-questions. This is helpful to consider if, say, the length of work does not seem commensurate with content, or when different forms express themselves in radically different durations.
Contribution
6) Research’s creative contribution to knowledge: How the creative work as a creative work generates new knowledge, insight, or understanding.
7) Aesthetic achievement in form, expressiveness, creating and conveying of ideas through means other than direct statement.
8) Innovation in creative practice technology; creation or refinement of a method or process; or innovation in form.
9) Innovation, insights, apprehension, or comprehension generated through achievement in form.
Significance
7) Significance of the new knowledge to the field
8) Significance of exhibition venue, publisher, broadcaster, or funding source
9) Recognition by experts or position of work in the field
- As a side note, on the question of nomenclature, perhaps we can end the traditional/non-traditional divide by renaming the ‘traditional’ for what it actually is: expository or philosophical. We could then claim ‘artistic’ for ourselves not as an exceptional form, but as one of a number of forms of outputs. ‘Artistic research’ is the standard nomenclature in Europe. ↩︎
- Also of interest for this discussion is the Templeton Foundation area of focus ‘Art Seeking Understanding’ which is explicitly based on empirically demonstrating that art works generate insight and understanding. I am informally involved in two of the studies within this ‘focus area’ and the results thus far are positive in favour of art being essential to human knowledge. As this study progresses, its findings, which will be communicated in analytic/scientific terms familiar to university research offices, may become increasingly helpful to the cause of recognising the significance of creative practice research. https://templetonreligiontrust.org/areas-of-focus/art-seeking-understanding/
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This contribution does not represent policy at Macquarie University or the University itself or anyone else who works there.