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The following article provides some interesting insights into science education and fostering creativity among science students.

Giddings, Morgan (3/29/2011). What kind of scientist are you? The Scientist. Retrieved 3/31/2011 from http://blog.the-scientist.com/2011/03/29/what-kind-of-scientist-are-you/.

 The article focuses on graduate school education, but I think it is applicable at all levels of science education. First, a quote from the author that helps to identify a science education problem. She is talking about a student defending his chosen dissertation topic:

Yet in all the questioning posed by the serious professors, and in all the fear that the student was experiencing, there was an elephant in the room that nobody discussed: was the hypothesis good enough to begin with? Were the questions really worth asking? If they weren’t, how would he improve them?

Some students had flunked out at the written prelim stage due to having poorly constructed hypotheses and questions. Sometimes it was difficult to separate bad writing from inadequate ideas. But in every case, the students were sent back to do it all over again, without a lot of guidance on a key point: how do you come up with really good questions?

This reminds me of when I was doing some consulting work with the Educational Testing Service many years ago. A group of us were helping ETS develop questions for a computer literacy test. The facilitator from ETS was a very capable person. As we discussed ideas and raised questions about our ideas, the facilitator often responded, “That’s a researchable question.” Eventually this became a “joke” that we laughed at each time we heard it.

The Morgan Giddings article is discussing the difference between a researchable question and a good researchable question. Can one teach graduate students, or students at other levels, to formulate questions that are both researchable and are good? What constitutes a good question?

Giddings answers by talking about left brain and right brain. Quoting from his article:

Was [Albert Einstein] famous for his experimental design acumen? No. In fact, he was so poor at certain left-brained activities that he flunked High School Algebra.

Rather, he was famous for right-brained activities, like asking great questions and having brilliant new insights. He synthesized disparate observations and facts into a new whole, and translated that into elegant mathematical language.

Giddings then suggests why students are not good at generating good questions:

I think there’s a simple reason why: hypothesis generation, and asking good questions, involves creative, right-brained thinking. Nobody pays any attention to it, because “creativity” and similar right-brained activities are assumed to have no place in hard science.

Modern scientific training is nearly always focused on left-brain activities like deduction, hypothesis testing, calculation, statistics, and so on.

Finally, Giddings discusses some suggestions to science teachers from Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind. Two of them are:

1. Laugh and play. These are right-brained activities. Most people I know do not get enough of either one of these. They will give a work-out to your right brain to get your creative muscles in order.
2. Lighten up. This is closely related to number one, but more basic. It seems our whole culture has gotten into a mode of taking itself far too seriously, and everywhere I go in academia, I see people with long, tired faces. I see people stressed about grants, funding, students, committees, and teaching. You can choose to ignore that stuff, if you want to. If you can’t lighten up, it will be very hard to laugh and play.

In summary, science is a broad, deep, and challenging area of study. However, it is full of fun and opportunities for creative thinking. While learning facts is important, asking and then trying to answer good, challenging questions that require higher-order thinking is a very important component of a good science education.

A Free Resource

Educators and parents who are interested in science education will likely enjoy my new free book:

Moursund, David (March, 2011). Expanding the Science and Technology Learning Experiences of Children. Eugene, OR: Information Age Education. For a description of this free 142 page book and downloading information go to http://iae-pedia.org/David_Moursund_Legacy_Fund#New_Free_Book_from_Moursund.