Collaborative Research: Measuring and Enhancing Scientific Creative Thinking for STEM Education and Research: Classroom-Aligned Assessment and Network Neuroscience-Based Mechanisms

协作研究：衡量和增强 STEM 教育和研究的科学创造性思维：课堂一致的评估和基于网络神经科学的机制

• 批准号: 1919851
• 负责人: Mariale Hardiman
• 金额: $ 8.67万
• 依托单位: Johns Hopkins University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2019-09-01 至 2022-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1919851&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Measuring; Enhancing; Scientific

This collaborative award to research teams at Pennsylvania State University, Georgetown University, and Johns Hopkins University will focus on creative thinking in STEM education and research. Creative thinking is critical for success in STEM fields, which often require generating novel hypotheses, flexibly connecting diverse information, and envisioning solutions to ill-defined problems. Creative innovation is a valuable attribute of the U.S. workforce in the global economy, and the ability to maximize the nation's creative potential is projected to become even more essential for opportunity as creativity emerges as the human ability least achievable by artificial intelligence. The increasing value of creative thinking for STEM coincides with new applications of neuroscience methods that have the potential to predict, and perhaps even to enhance, creativity. Yet creativity is an under-researched contributor to STEM success. Indeed, there is not currently a measure of scientific creative thinking that educators can use to reliably determine what works (and what does not) in STEM education to foster creative thinking. This project will bring together a research team that represents an uncommon bridging of neuroscience and classroom-focused expertise. They will work with middle school and university educators to develop a new measure of scientific creative thinking and to use new neuroscientific tools to test whether a brain network that predicts an individual's general capacity for creative thinking can also predict their ability to think creatively with scientific content beyond what can be explained by their baseline cognitive ability. By testing whether neural data add value to traditional academic measures in predicting students' future creative thinking and STEM performance, this project will inform timely debates on the value of neuroscience for education. This work will also bridge the laboratory and the classroom in novel ways by longitudinally measuring change in brain network strength associated with of real-world STEM learning. By providing foundational knowledge on the nature and measurement of scientific creative thinking, the project will inform educational efforts to promote creative thinking in the classroom. This project will have additional impacts for broadening participation in STEM Fields by working with teachers of minority student populations underrepresented in STEM fields to optimize classroom usability for a test of scientific creative thinking. The project is funded by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances the fundamental research literature on STEM learning. The project directly fits the intent of ECR to facilitate the development, refinement, and testing of new education research, measurement, and evaluation methodologies.This project aims to provide foundational knowledge on the cognitive and neural basis of scientific creative thinking. To this end, we will collaborate with educators to develop and psychometrically validate a new test of scientific creative thinking, assessing students' ability to generate novel hypotheses, research questions, and experimental designs. We will also leverage developments in the network neuroscience of domain-general creativity, including the recent discovery of a specific network of brain regions in which functional connectivity strength can predict an individual's creative performance. Specifically, the project will 1) construct a new assessment of scientific creative thinking, incorporating classroom-usability (working with STEM teachers in urban Baltimore) and expanded psychometric scale development, and 2) use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to extend our recent findings on the functional brain networks that support domain-general creativity to identify neural overlap/distinctness between domain-general and scientific creativity, and longitudinally to test whether strength of neural networks adds value to standard academic measures (e.g., grades) in predicting future creative thinking and STEM performance. This study will also provide the first large-scale analysis of cognitive and affective traits that support scientific creative thinking in STEM undergraduates, as well as preliminary data on whether network neuroscience methods developed in the lab can be used to measure neural strengthening of creative thinking ability through real-world STEM learning.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

该合作奖授予宾夕法尼亚州立大学、乔治城大学和约翰霍普金斯大学的研究团队，将重点关注STEM教育和研究中的创造性思维。创造性思维对于在STEM领域取得成功至关重要，这通常需要提出新的假设，灵活地连接不同的信息，并设想解决不明确问题的方案。在全球经济中，创造性创新是美国劳动力的一个宝贵属性，随着创造力成为人工智能最难实现的人类能力，最大限度地发挥国家创造潜力的能力预计将变得更加重要。创造性思维对STEM的价值日益增加，与神经科学方法的新应用相吻合，这些方法有可能预测，甚至可能增强创造力。然而，创造力是STEM成功的一个未被充分研究的因素。事实上，目前还没有一种科学创造性思维的衡量标准，教育工作者可以用它来可靠地确定在STEM教育中哪些是有效的（哪些是无效的），以培养创造性思维。该项目将汇集一个研究团队，代表了神经科学和课堂专业知识的罕见桥梁。他们将与中学和大学教育工作者合作，开发一种新的科学创造性思维的测量方法，并使用新的神经科学工具来测试预测个人一般创造性思维能力的大脑网络是否也可以预测他们创造性地思考科学内容的能力，这些能力超出了他们的基本认知能力。通过测试神经数据是否在预测学生未来的创造性思维和STEM表现方面为传统的学术指标增加了价值，该项目将及时为有关神经科学对教育价值的辩论提供信息。这项工作还将通过纵向测量与现实世界STEM学习相关的大脑网络强度变化，以新颖的方式架起实验室和课堂的桥梁。通过提供关于科学创造性思维的本质和测量的基础知识，该项目将为在课堂上促进创造性思维的教育工作提供信息。该项目将通过与STEM领域代表性不足的少数民族学生群体的教师合作，优化课堂可用性，以测试科学创造性思维，从而对扩大STEM领域的参与产生额外的影响。该项目由EHR核心研究（ECR）项目资助，该项目支持推进STEM学习基础研究文献的工作。该项目直接符合ECR的意图，即促进新的教育研究、测量和评估方法的开发、改进和测试。本项目旨在为科学创造性思维的认知和神经基础提供基础知识。为此，我们将与教育工作者合作，开发并从心理测量学上验证一种新的科学创造性思维测试，评估学生提出新假设、研究问题和实验设计的能力。我们还将利用一般领域创造力的网络神经科学的发展，包括最近发现的一个特定的大脑区域网络，在这个网络中，功能连接强度可以预测个人的创造性表现。具体而言，该项目将1)构建一种新的科学创造性思维评估方法，结合课堂可用性（与巴尔的摩城市STEM教师合作）和扩展的心理测量量表开发；2)使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）扩展我们最近在支持一般领域创造力的功能性大脑网络上的发现，以识别一般领域创造力和科学创造力之间的神经重叠/独特性。纵向测试神经网络的强度是否在预测未来的创造性思维和STEM表现方面为标准学术指标（如成绩）增加了价值。本研究还将首次对支持STEM本科生科学创造性思维的认知和情感特征进行大规模分析，并提供有关实验室开发的网络神经科学方法是否可用于通过现实世界的STEM学习来测量创造性思维能力的神经强化的初步数据。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。