Supporting students’ creativity in primary science education Classroom practices and teacher conceptions

Abstract

The objective of the thesis is to examine how creativity can be facilitated in primary science education by exploring essential aspects of creativity and different aspects that contribute to the development and strengthening of students’ creativity. The thesis comprises three articles that present results from three different studies that focus on and shed light on various aspects of the objective of the thesis, in addition to a meta-text. The research is conducted in a Norwegian primary school and considers three central perspectives: the student-teacher interaction perspective through video-observation (Article I); the student perspective through video-observation (Article II); and the teacher perspective through interviews (Article III). The overarching research problem is: How can creativity be facilitated in primary science education? The overarching research problem is concretised by five research questions, corresponding to the three articles of the thesis. The thesis considers creativity theory and literature on how to support creativity within an educational context, embedded in social cognitive theory. Social cognitive theory highlights students’ and teachers’ creative self-efficacy and observational learning by social modelling. A social cognitive view of facilitating students’ creativity is based on the perspective that humans exercise agency through a system of triadic reciprocal causation among external factors, internal factors, and behaviour. It recognises the joint involvement of teachers, students, and the learning environment, and acknowledges the important role of the teacher in facilitating the environment and functioning as a role model for the students. Data are collected during a teacher-practitioner collaboration influenced by the principles of design-based research (DBR). By collaborating with two teachers, the researcher developed a design for learning and creativity, called ‘Mission Mars’, which aimed to support students’ creativity. The two teachers implemented the design in three primary science classes (one fifth grade and two sixth grade classes) over the course of 1,5 years. Data consist of video observation of students working on ‘Mission Mars’ (23 groups á 3-5 students) and interviews with two teachers before developing the design, after the first implementation and after the third and final implementation of the design (two individual interviews per teacher and one group interview). Through a qualitatively driven multimethod concurrent design, the data are analysed with the use of three different analysis methods to develop a comprehensive understanding of the research problem. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is used to gain insight into the teachers’ beliefs about creativity, Conversation Analysis (CA) is used to gain insight into what teachers do when interacting with students by focusing on their words and deeds, and constructivist Grounded Theory (GT) is used to gain insight into the students’ creative process. Through a synthesis of the findings in the three articles, three conditions for facilitating creativity in primary science education are identified: (1) capitalising on the students’ creative thinking abilities; (2) a shift in thinking towards a more collaborative student-teacher interaction; and (3) increasing teachers’ creative self-efficacy. First, capitalising on the students’ creative thinking abilities, highlights that students have creative skills that may be squandered in the classroom. It is important that teachers and researchers acknowledge and capitalise on the students’ creative competence when teaching for creativity and developing strategies and methods for creative learning. The findings related to Article II show that the students can come up with several ideas, combine and synthesise different ideas and concepts to make new ideas, and elaborate on their creative ideas in collaboration with their peers. In this process, the students use several higher-level thinking skills related to creative thinking and prove that they can conduct both divergent thinking and convergent thinking. They are also able to include science content knowledge in the process. By explicitly focus on making the creative process visible through dialogue and by allowing the students to explain how their ideas are developed, the teacher can use a skill focused approach rather than an evaluative approach. Yet, the findings in Article I show that the teachers encourage students to present their ideas and then evaluate the ideas by displaying preference or dis-preference without exploring how the ideas are developed or could be further developed. Second, a shift in thinking towards a more collaborative student-teacher interaction represents a need to fundamentally change the way teachers interact with students during creative processes. Literature on how teachers can support students’ creativity implies that teachers should act as collaborators that follow up on the students’ ideas together with the students, provide sufficient feedback with the use of open-ended questions and cue the students within the domain and task restraints. The results from Article I and Article III suggest, however, that guiding the students in such context is challenging for the teachers due to a product-oriented focus, the wish to maintain control over the class, and a wish to help and follow up on all groups. This results in minimal time used on each group. Third, increasing teachers’ creative self-efficacy is needed if they are to facilitate and support students’ creativity in the classroom. Teachers’ creative self-efficacy is important as it serves as a mediator to their behaviour in the classroom. The results from Article III show that, even if the teachers value creativity as an important aspect of the science education, the teachers have doubt in their own creative abilities and in their own competence in supporting students’ creativity. The wish to support creativity and facilitate creativity in the classroom are also seen to compromise with the need to cover all the standards. They are also hesitant to allow the students sufficient freedom and time to make their own choices and think creatively, because they fear this will cause chaos in class. The teachers present a narrow view of creativity by focusing mainly on the novelty aspect of creativity, while minimising the importance of appropriateness. This misconception of creativity leads the teachers to believe that creativity can only flourish when students are given complete freedom, undermining the importance of structure and constraints in creative processes. This also impacts their creative self-efficacy in a negative manner as their self-efficacy is determined by a need for control and structure in their teaching. The observational data support these findings as the teachers’ creative self-efficacy impact their behaviour in the classroom. The knowledge contributed by this thesis is of importance for teachers in primary school that want to facilitate students’ creativity. Embedding creative learning in a social cognitive theory framework also highlights how creativity can be facilitated in a way that builds on the students’ competences and creative thinking skills, and where teacher and students collaborate in developing little-c creative ideas from the students personally meaningful mini-c ideas through dialogue, modelling and cuing. It also highlights how teacher agency is based on their creative self-efficacy and understanding of creativity in the context of science education.