Asking gifted science learners to be creative

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Abstract:

The focus of this chapter is an activity, a science analogy game, introduced as part of a science enrichment programme for 14–15 year old gifted students attending English state schools. The ‘game’ was designed to be fun, but had a serious rationale. The activity was intended to encourage students to think divergently around school science concepts, and thus to be creative in a science learning context.

Contents:

• INTRODUCTION
• CREATIVITY IN SCIENCE AND SCIENCE LEARNING
• Creating new scientific knowledge
• ‘Admitting’ the subjective into science
• Creating new scientific learning
• REPRODUCTION RATHER THAN CREATION: LEARNING SCIENCE IN ENGLISH SECONDARY SCHOOLS
• Gifted education moving out of, and back into, educational fashion
• A national policy on ‘gifted and talented’
• Meeting the needs of the most able in science
• ASCEND: A PARTNERSHIP PROJECT TO SUPPORT SCHOOLS IN PROVISION FOR THEIR GIFTED SCIENCE STUDENTS
• Group work
• Metacognition
• The nature of science
• Conference format
• THE ANALOGY GAME
• Analogy, discovery and learning
• Generating similes for scientific concepts
• Playing the analogy game
• IMAGINING AND JUSTIFYING SIMILARITY
• Sharing the creative act
• Prioritising justification
• DISCUSSION
• Evaluating and developing the activity
• Building upon learners’ ideas
• In conclusion

Shift	Notes
From product to process	School science education needs to balance learning about the outputs of science (laws, theories etc) with learning about the processes of science
From justification to discovery	School science education needs to emphasise the creative process of imagining new ideas as well as the logical process of testing them
From breadth to depth	School science education needs to allow students opportunities to engage with ideas in depth in an exploratory mode of study, as well as opportunities to learn key established ideas from a range of important topics across the sciences
From cognition to metacognition	School science should offer opportunities for learners to develop their self-knowledge of the strengths and limits of existing knowledge, and how it can be used as a starting point for development
From analysis to synthesis	School science education should provide opportunities for learners to demonstrate divergent thinking, and find new perspectives and linkages, as well as opportunities to deconstruct, analyse and critique existing arguments and thinking
From facts to possibilities	School science should reflect post-positivist views of science as offering robust but provisional knowledge that is always open to being revisited in the light of new evidence
From prescription to responsibility	Schools science should provide learners with opportunities to take responsibility for planning, monitoring and evaluating their learning in science, as well as will opportunities to learn well-established procedures from structured teaching.

This chapter reports one of the activities designed for the ASCEND (‘Able Scientists Collectively Experiencing New Demands’) project. (Read about the ASCEND Project here.)

Find this chapter on SpringerLink.

Download the author's manuscript version of the chapter here.