Chemistry Teachers’ Perceptions and Attitudes Towards Creativity in Chemistry Class

Abstract

Creativity plays an important role in science and society, in research as well as in finding solutions for everyday problems. Fostering scientific creativity by applying open, student-oriented teaching styles is an important task in class. Since only little current research in this field can be found, we developed our own questionnaire. Within this questionnaire, we investigated chemistry teachers’ perceptions and attitudes towards creativity and what creative methods they use in class. In addition, we evaluated which character traits of students were favoured by the chemistry teachers. With this, we wanted to verify studies that have been done in the 1990s. In the questionnaire, open questions as well as Likert-scaled items were used. The study was conducted as an online questionnaire; in total 64 questionnaires were evaluated. Analysis of the data shows that the teachers estimate their own creativity rather negatively. They favour students’ character traits that do not belong to a creative child; here differences regarding gender could be identified: male teachers, as well as teachers with math or science as a second subject, rate the character trait logical more positively than female teachers. Looking at the attitudes towards creativity, female teachers think more often that creativity promotes success. In addition, teachers know about teaching methods that are able to foster scientific creativity in class; however, creativity is basically not considered. Therefore, it is important to develop concepts for pre-service and in-service teacher education that enable teachers in a better way for creative teaching, creativity teaching and teaching for creativity.