Beliefs About Scientific Creativity Held by Pre-Service Science Teachers in the State of Kuwait

Abstract

Understanding teachers’ sentiments and views is a central goal of the educational research community; especially, understanding teachers’ beliefs which could be transferred to classroom practices. Teachers’ beliefs about creativity and how they can nurture it has been investigated in several studies, but there is a lack of studies exploring teachers’ beliefs about creativity in the science classroom. The current study aims to understand the beliefs of pre-service science teachers about scientific creativity, fostering creativity in the science classroom, the characteristics of creative students in science, and the encouraging and challenging factors. The research design has an exploratory nature based on a questionnaire consisting of 18 closed-ended questions and eight open-ended questions. 152 questionnaires were quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. The results indicated that science is seen as a creative school subject. Participants view scientific creativity as original, useful, imaginative, and having empirical actions. Commitment, curiosity, enthusiasm, questioning, and experimenting are the characteristics of creative students in the science classroom. Other factors that encourage or hinder the process of nurturing scientific creativity were also identified. Implementations and suggestions for future study are also discussed.