Study On The Innovation Capability Of Chinese Graduate Students

Postgraduates have played an increasingly important role in China's scientific and technological innovation. However, when compared with those in developed countries, the postgraduates in China lack core competitiveness and thus their creativity is at a disadvantage. Therefore, how to enhance the creativity of postgraduates has become a theoretical and practical problem that Chinese higher education has to resolve.The creativity of postgraduates is a new concept in the modern theory of creativity, which consists of graduate students'creative behavior, process and results. In the perspective of the subject and the environment of creation, the system of graduates' creativity is composed of three sub-systems:Graduates' cognitive subsystem, personality subsystem, social and cultural subsystem. The creativity of graduate students can also be divided into implicit and explicit creativity. Implicit creativity refers to various creative factors that are related to the postgraduates themselves, i.e., the physiological function, both intelligence and non-intellectual qualities and innovative thinking. The explicit creativity is the ability to generate new and appropriate ideas or make some technological achievements which are feasible and predictable in the world's development and which are widely recognized by teachers, universities and society.The process of the generation of postgraduates'creativity, in which the implicit creativity is transformed to the explicit one, is consistent with the "stimuli-interpretation-response" model of thinking and behavior. In such a process, the postgraduates'personality characteristics, cognitive style, the research team consisting of the tutor and the graduate students all contributed, as essential elements, to graduates'creativity.In practice, graduates'creative achievements differ in the realm of "new" and "harmony". This means that there exists a kind of quantifiable levels in the creativity of graduates. In this paper, by proposing the concept of "differential of graduate students'creativity", we divided graduate students into three levels of creativity, that is, high, intermediate, and lower. And this concept was used for the construction of the operational system of assessment, motivating and enhancing graduate students' creativity. The concepts of "graduate students'creativity" and "differential of graduate students'creativity" are based on Chinese and foreign scholars'modern theory of creativity. Western Guilford, Torrance, Gardner, Amabile and Sternberg and others have thoroughly explored human creativity from the physical level. Especially, Sternberg's theory of "creativity investment" provides important reference and inspiration in the study of Chinese graduate students'creativity. Liu Zhonglin and other researchers' profound analyses of the connection between human creativity and cultural characteristics offered suggestive and intellectual support for the enhancement of Chinese graduates' creativity.Creativity education of foreign graduate students is an essential reference to the discussion of Chinese graduates'creativity. And the cultivation of postgraduates' creativity in the United States, Germany, India, Brazil and other countries indicate: The graduates' educations in these countries aim to cultivate innovative talents by establishing standards of graduates' education and continuously improving quality assurance systems; moreover, according to the national economic development, they continuously adjust the development scale of graduate education and continuously increase the financing means of graduate education and thus form of multi-channel financing patterns.In recent years, Chinese graduate students'creativity and its cultivation have made great progress, but there still exist many problems. Investigations subjected to graduates from Hefei's universities of science and engineering showed the main reasons for postgraduate's insufficient creativity as follows:firstly, innovation is not the primary objective of graduate education; secondly, matriculation system puts too much emphasis on scores but little on ability; thirdly, outdated and single curriculum as well as knowledge-focused teaching mechanism; fourthly, education system which emphasizes on teaching and learning rather than researching; fifthly, less and less instruction from supervisors; sixthly, formalization and mechanization of assessment of postgraduate education; seventhly, the elimination mechanism is far from perfect.Statistical analysis of a sample of physics, chemistry, biology and other disciplines of the national excellent doctoral dissertation and case study of the authors'development of creativity showed that universities'research teams, which are mainly composed of postgraduates, demonstrate some regulative macro features and behavior models:first, one's innovation has some association with his/her age; second, cooperation on scientific research is vital to universities'creative research teams; third, innovative teams still need experts'guidance; fourth, academic atmosphere influences the university's creative research teams. Viewing from the theory of "modern creativity", as for the expansion of graduates'creativity, many defects existed in knowledge structure, ways of thinking, creative personality, creative motivation, and innovation system and environment.According to the above systematic considerations, this paper suggests that, in the future development of graduate students'creative ability, it is necessary to improve the graduates'aesthetic logic, to train their practical intelligence and tacit knowledge learning, to build a advanced team of innovative teachers, to provide more post-graduate academic exchange opportunities and occasions, and to create positive academic atmosphere.Postgraduates'creativity correlates with not only the graduates'lives, but also universities and the nation. Therefore, we expect more profound and extensive researches on such a significant topic.In summary, the main innovations are as follows:1.We make comprehensive use of modern western theories of creativity to investigate the practical problems of Chinese graduates' creativity;2.Based on the sample of the national excellent doctoral dissertation, the paper empirically analyzed macro features and behavior models of graduates'innovative scientific research teams and thus revealed the regularity of some macro characteristics of the Chinese universities' innovative research teams; A questionnaire survey has conducted with a larger sample group of Hefei universities' graduate students. And its findings present the reasons for the weakness of Chinese graduates' creativity;3.By comparison and integration of Chinese and western theories of creativity, and by comprehensive making use of aesthetical logic, the ways of creation and the concept of "graduate creative differential", the paper points out that, in the process of cultivating engineering graduate students' creativity, it is necessary to change the situation in which too much emphasis was put on conceptual thinking, formative logical analysis and knowledge. In contrast, it is suggested to develop the graduates' image thinking, aesthetic logical analysis, tacit knowledge and practical intelligence, Thus, a kind of personalized training program of postgraduates'creativity, which synthesizes both conceptual thinking and image thinking, both formative logic and aesthetic logic, both knowledge explained in words and that comprehended by sense, is recommended.