Abstract

As STEAM activities require both the teachers and learners to be creative, it is important to train teachers to instruct and guide creativity not only when students begin a task, but also throughout its entire process persistently to maintain creative behaviors. To assess the creative process in teacher education, a currently limited topic within the literature, we examined 37 in-service teachers, who were participating in a creative pedagogy course, through a divergent creativity test (Alternative Uses Test) and a CreaCube task (a creative problem-solving task involving modular robotics). We used CreaCube as a digital manipulative task that was performed twice to ensure the creative assessment’s authenticity in relation to STEAM education. In the second execution, the participants did not know whether they had to reproduce the same solution or find a new one. Our results show that only a quarter of the teachers proposed new solutions during the task repetition, and that this conservative and repetitive behavior increased the task completion speed. However, this suggests that even in the context of creative pedagogy courses, teachers’ tendencies to prioritize speed and the application of existing solutions tendency remains a barrier to engaging in more creative behaviors that require inhibiting previous solutions and exploring new ideas. This study sheds light on the importance of teachers experimenting with this conservative behavior bias during their training and the significance of persistently applying creative behaviors in STEAM activities. Accordingly, it is essential that teachers consider these factors when developing and delivering their courses.

Highlights

  • As the world is rapidly changing and evolving, its citizens must prepare themselves to work in currently unknown positions, and solve many new environmental, economic, and social problems (World Economic Forum, 2020)

  • We examined teachers in continuing education, who voluntarily enrolled in a creativity course, and analyzed their divergent thinking through the Alternative Uses Test (AUT) and their convergent thinking with CreaCube

  • Despite being on a creativity course, the memorization hypothesis for the task repetition shows an important number of participants to lack a creative opportunity for the task repetition

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Summary

Introduction

As the world is rapidly changing and evolving, its citizens must prepare themselves to work in currently unknown positions, and solve many new environmental, economic, and social problems (World Economic Forum, 2020). 21st century competencies such as creativity aim to develop citizen and professional opportunities in uncertain contexts (Beghetto, 2019), a goal that has increased in importance since the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, it is crucial for students to develop their creative competency, as they are linked to transversal competencies that are considered essential for today’s citizenship (Bicer et al, 2019; Kim and Choi, 2019). Creativity is required to solve complex problems by combining divergent thinking (idea generation) as well as convergent thinking (selecting ideas) and persevere by developing concrete outcomes (Grohman et al, 2017; Lille and Romero, 2017). Creativity engages a higher level of learning and comprehension than other

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