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

这项合作奖授予宾夕法尼亚州立大学、乔治敦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STEM领域的成功至关重要，这通常需要产生新的假设，灵活地连接不同的信息，并设想解决方案来解决定义不清的问题。创造性创新是美国劳动力在全球经济中的一个宝贵属性，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对机会变得更加重要。创造性思维对STEM的价值不断增加，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增强创造力。然而，创造力是STEM成功的一个研究不足的贡献者。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教育中什么是有效的（什么是无效的），以培养创造性思维。该项目将汇集一个研究团队，代表神经科学和课堂专业知识的不寻常的桥梁。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衡量标准，并使用新的神经科学工具来测试预测个人创造性思维能力的大脑网络是否也可以预测他们对科学内容的创造性思维能力。通过测试神经数据在预测学生未来的创造性思维和STEM表现方面是否为传统的学术措施增加了价值，该项目将及时为关于神经科学教育价值的辩论提供信息。这项工作还将通过纵向测量与真实世界STEM学习相关的大脑网络强度变化，以新颖的方式连接实验室和课堂。通过提供关于科学创造性思维的性质和测量的基础知识，该项目将为促进课堂创造性思维的教育工作提供信息。该项目将通过与在STEM领域代表性不足的少数民族学生群体的教师合作，优化科学创造性思维测试的课堂可用性，从而扩大STEM领域的参与。该项目由EHR核心研究（ECR）计划资助，该计划支持推进STEM学习基础研究文献的工作。该项目直接符合ECR的意图，以促进新的教育研究，测量和评估方法的开发，改进和测试。该项目旨在提供科学创造性思维的认知和神经基础的基础知识。为此，我们将与教育工作者合作，开发和心理测试验证科学创造性思维的新测试，评估学生产生新的假设，研究问题和实验设计的能力。我们还将利用领域一般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，其中功能连接强度可以预测个人的创造力表现。具体而言，该项目将1）构建一个新的评估科学创造性思维，纳入课堂可用性（与巴尔的摩城市的STEM教师合作）和扩展的心理测量量表开发，2）使用功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）来扩展我们最近在支持领域一般创造力的功能性大脑网络上的发现，以识别领域之间的神经重叠/区别，一般和科学创造力，并纵向测试神经网络的强度是否增加了标准学术测量的价值（例如，预测未来的创造性思维和STEM表现。这项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，以及实验室开发的网络神经科学方法是否可用于通过真实的-世界STEM学习。该奖项反映了NSF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进行评估，被认为值得支持的搜索.

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.