Comparisons by age
The main purpose of this paper is to report on the development and characteristics
of a test of scientific creativity. However, as an illustration of the way it may be
used to research the development of scientific creativity, we will report something
of the profile of the sample of students who have used the test for this report.
Comparisons were made in terms of the subjects’ age. As shown in table 7, 12-
year-old children scored significantly lower than did 13-year-old children (signif-
icant at the 0.01 level). But the mean difference between 13-year-old children and
15-year-old children is significant only at the 0.05 level. When one-way ANOVA
was run,
F = 6.53,
p = 0.002. That indicates an overall difference for the three age
groups, so we can conclude that the scientific creativity of these secondary school
students increases with the increase of age but that it is not linear relationship.
There is no general agreement about the development of creativity. Findley
and Lumsden (1988) remarked that from the age of 7 to early adolescence there
seems to be a continual decline in creativity caused by greater attention to peer
pressure and social conventions. But Chein (1982) concluded that the creative
thinking abilities of gifted students increases with age. Lubart (1994) has suggested
that creativity is related to both knowledge and experience. Amabile (1987),
Sternberg and Lubart (1991) and Feldhusen (1995) all report that domain-specific
knowledge and skills are a necessary component of creativity. Creative thinking is
also moderately related to academic achievement (Zheng and Xiao 1983) although
there seems to be no linear relationship between knowledge and creativity
(Simonton 1983). With the increase of age, scientific knowledge, experience, and
skills increase so according to the above researchers, scientific creativity should
increase but it should not have linear relationship with age. This is supported by
the results reported here.
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