Chapter 9 - Discipline Creativity

Summary

A comparison of disciplines is helpful for teaching creativity to identify similarities and differences in the creative process. A challenge for all disciplines is to create a balance between teaching higher-level abilities, such as creativity, and the lower-level technical skills required by the discipline. But there are also differences among disciplines. Scientific training emphasizes avoiding mistakes so it is more risk-aversive than training in the arts in which taking risks is often encouraged. Research on science and mathematics learning includes evaluating the effects of exposing preservice elementary teachers to multiple representations, measuring scientific creativity in elementary school students, identifying competencies for scientific reasoning in junior high school, and designing instruction on complex systems at all levels in the curriculum. TRIZ, an acronym for the Russian phrase ‘theory of inventive problem solving’, has influenced the design and evaluation of curricula for engineering students.