Primary And Secondary School Teachers And Students' Implicit Theories Of Creativity

The view of creativity is a complex epistemological system about creativity stored in people's mind. It is the common concepts or beliefs of a particular social group about the nature of creativity, the process of creation, the personality of creative people, the relationship between creativity and other factors, the methods fostering creativity, which depends on the time and cultural background. Teachers play an important role in fostering creativity students' creativity, and their views of creativity not only have potential impact on their own teaching practice in fostering creativity, but also affect their perception of the behavior of creative students, as well as their support for students' creative learning activities. The exploration of teachers and students' views of creativity will help learn about all aspects of their understanding of creativity, in order to lay the foundation for analizing the relationship between teachers' view of creativity and their teaching behaviors, as well as students' learning behaviors, which will point out the direction for relevant teacher training.An approach of combining qualitative and quantitative research methods is taken in this study. Using self-prepared questionnaires, a large-scale investigation of creativity views of primary and secondary school teachers and students covering eastern, central and western areas of China were carried out, in order to outline the overall profiles of these two social groups' creativity views. In addition, the creativity views of teachers, students and the experts studying creativity were compared separately. The following are the main results:1. The definition of creativity: the majority of teachers and students define creativity as the a process of generating new and useful products. The reference rate of "unique or new" is much higher than "useful." As for the process of creation, teachers refer to creation, to break the restrictions, to put into practice, problem solving and thinking; students refer to creation, thinking, inventions, improvements, to put into practice. 2. View of the elements of creativity: the vast majority of teachers and students believe that intrinsic motivation and relevant knowledge can promote creativity, creativity activities mainly depends on the creation environment and are free from restrictions on the field. Teachers think that creativity and intellectual capacity are related to some extent, but people with high intelligence does not necessarily have a high ability to create. There is a very significant difference between secondary school teachers and primary school teachers' attitudes of some creativity elements. 3. View of creative students: the majority of teachers and students agree that students are generally creative, academic achievement and creativity are mutually independent relatively, personality characteristics will affect the creativity activities to a large extent. The top5 creative student characteristics teachers mentioned are: unique, imaginative, always questioning, intelligent, wit and flexible; and in students' mind, intelligent, unique, imaginative, liking thinking, creativity and hardworking are the typical characteristics of creative students. the rate of some features mentioned have significant differences on gender, discipline, position and the teacher-student. 4. Creativity-fostering view: The vast majority of teachers and students believe that the ability can be fostered. More teachers adapt a culture of teacher-centered strategies: to encourage questioning, liking or willing to think, divergent thinking training, to improve the autonomy, to reward creativity, the accumulation of knowledge, and have the intention to create a more open, relaxed and harmonious atmosphere for teaching. The ways of creative thinking students refer more to are: to think more, to imaginate, careful observation, hands-on experience, to question bravely. In addition, secondary school teachers are inclined to think that the current teaching is not conducive to creativity in learning and creation skills training is needed to be brought into the curriculum.