Imagination, Creativity, and the Nature of Science
Kristen DiCerbo, Vice President of Learning Research and Design at Pearson on how educators are helping students to see science as an imaginative undertaking.
In my high school chemistry class, lab grades were partially based on how close our lab results came to the “correct” answer. I mostly recall this because my answer was once 135% off, which left me quite worried about the impact of -35% on my semester average. What this experience taught me at the time was that there is one right answer in science and doing lab work was essentially about finding this correct answer.
Educators have been trying since the 1960s to teach students that the nature of science (i.e., the tenets/ characteristics of science) is not absolute, rather, it is tentative and the result of human inference, imagination, and creativity combined with measurable data. Though I attended high school in the late 1980s, my chemistry department clearly had not yet adopted the mindset that creativity and imagination are critical to the process of science.
Science educators have moved toward using inquiry methods to help teach students to see science as an imaginative undertaking, but research suggests engaging students in inquiry activities alone is not enough. In one interesting study, a teacher taught two classes where students were asked to complete six inquiry-based activities, including one where they were given fossil fragments and asked to draw what they thought the complete organism would look like.
We must explicitly discuss with learners how evidence and imagination come together to make the practice of science an interesting pursuit if we are to engage them in tackling the difficult scientific problems of the future.
For one class (called implicit), the debrief after the activity focused on the science concepts explored. For the other class (called explicit), the debrief covered both the concepts explored and the nature of science. The latter discussion covered topics such as why two people might have different pictures based on the same fossil fragment and the potential effect that the discovery of another piece of the fossil could have on earlier ideas.
Students in both classes were given pre-tests and post-tests about their understanding of the nature of science. On the pre-test, when asked about scientists’ use of creativity in determining what dinosaurs looked like, students in both groups said scientists got their ideas about what dinosaurs looked like because they had seen pictures of them. One student said, “…[scientists] cannot imagine true things…scientists were sure this was the shape of dinosaurs…they cannot change their minds.”
On the post-tests, students in the implicit group did not change their minds about the role of imagination in science. However, students in the explicit group were more likely to give responses indicating that scientists used both evidence and imagination to determine what dinosaurs looked like and to respond to other more general questions in ways that indicated they believed scientists used creativity. In the end, the explicit group went from 3% acknowledging the role of creativity and imagination in science in the pre-test to 34% expressing these ideas in the post-test. Note that 34% still isn’t very high. It is likely that beliefs about imagination and creativity in science cannot be influenced in a period of weeks, but need to be reinforced over a period of months and years.
Other research suggests that even highly educated adults don’t have a full picture of how imagination and creativity work in science. Many believe imagination and creativity are used to generate new theories or explanations of how the world works. However, there isn’t a common understanding of how imagination plays a role throughout the entire process of scientific inquiry. We must explicitly discuss with learners how evidence and imagination come together to make the practice of science an interesting pursuit if we are to engage them in tackling the difficult scientific problems of the future.
