| Abstrakt: |
The goal of the current research was to investigate how STL (Scientific and Technological Literacy) teaching in science classes influences ninth-grade students' creative thinking and to identify any hierarchical levels for a qualitative description of students' creative thinking development. STZ is taken to mean developing the ability to creatively utilise sound science knowledge (and ways of working) in everyday life, to solve problems, make decisions and hence improve the quality of life. It recognizes four essential components of science education teaching — learning outcomes geared to cognitive development, utilising science method attributes, personal development, and social values. Eight teachers, one from each of 8 different Estonian schools involved in the study, were enrolled in an 8-month STL teaching in-service course and gained ownership of STL teaching approaches, measured in terms of their ability to create social-issue based teaching materials. During this course, the teachers developed collaboratively the teaching materials, based on STL scenarios, and their 80 students (ten average students — 5 male and 5 females, from a class of each of the eight teachers) were exposed to an 8-week STL teaching module that was scheduled by the end of the teachers' training course. For assessing students' creative thinking abilities, a discrepant event test was used before and after an 8-week STL teaching module, using three scales: asking questions, suggesting causes, and predicting consequences. Hierarchical cluster analysis was conducted across all pre- and post-test data of creative thinking, and led to the identification of three groups of students in terms of the quality of their creative thinking. The current study showed that although students' quantitative creative thinking abilities (fluency) increased significantly within the STL teaching environment, it was difficult to modify the quality of students' creative thinking abilities (flexibility, originality). Almost two thirds of the students did not upgrade their hierarchical level within any scale of creative thinking, but STL teaching intervention was still considered as an effective approach with significant impact on students' creative thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
