“Creating Creativity”: Improving Pre-service Teachers’ Conceptions About Creativity in Chemistry

Abstract

Although creativity is considered one of the key competencies in modern society and a central aspect of nature of science, it has been neither established as a main topic in chemistry education research nor in today’s chemistry education practice. In contrast to its real nature, students mostly characterise chemistry as a solely logical and analytical discipline and fail to appreciate the importance of creativity in the development of chemical knowledge. The research project tries to address this deficiency. Based on the assumption that chemistry teachers’ adequate conceptions represent a necessary condition on the way to implement creativity into education practice, the principle aim of our study was to support prospective chemistry teachers in developing these conceptions. Thus, two different approaches were evaluated concerning their impact on teacher students’ conceptions in pre-service chemistry teacher courses at the University of Cologne. While the first approach reflects concrete historical examples of creative modelling processes, the latter offers learning environments, in which teacher students have to become creative themselves. Data were collected by open-ended questionnaires, participant observation and semi-structured interviews. The findings indicate that the first approach particularly enables the students to recognise that creativity is important in chemistry, while the latter rather offers the opportunity to realise how creativity works in chemistry. In order to develop comprehensive conceptions, a combined approach seems to be the most suitable.