THE PEDAGOGY OF INGENUITY IN SCIENCE: AN EXPLORATION OF CREATIVE THINKING IN THE SECONDARY SCIENCE CLASSROOM

The importance of creative thinking in science cannot be overstated. Creativity is integral to the development of knowledge about the natural world and the knowledge, skills and abilities that support it are in need of greater understanding. The Next Generation Science Standards (2012) include practices that implicitly emphasize the creative thinking in science that students should develop by the 12th grade. These science practices were utilized in a framework to explore a group of secondary science classrooms in order to investigate potential relationships between classroom variables and student creative thinking in science. A measure of scientific creative thinking (Hu & Adey, 2002) was used with 284 student participants from 21 different classes, six different schools and from seven different teachers. Students’ performance on a pre to post-administration of the measure was compared against case studies that were developed of each classroom to determine trends. Those case studies were developed across one semester using 2-3 observations per class per semester and the collection and analysis of teachers’ labs and other instructional materials. The outcomes of a pre to post-administration of the measure, when coupled with the case studies, suggested three distinct trends in relationships between classroom variables and students’ scientific creative thinking. These trends: originality in the use of scientific tools, originality and variety in the development of scientific questions, and the role of context in the development of original, engineering-type design tasks are discussed in the context of research on creative thinking in science and in the science practices in the Next Generation Science Standards (NRC, 2012).Ph.D. in Science Education, July 201