Fostering students' mathematical creativity is important for their understanding and success in mathematics courses as well as their persistence in STEM, but it necessitates intentional instructional actions, such as designing and implementing tasks that have the potential to foster creativity. As teaching innovation requires support for…

What do children really wonder about? What encourages children to wonder? Where is space found for children to share their wonderings in school? What, if any, is the role of the teacher in a child's wondering? And what is the value of wondering in primary science classrooms today? Lynne Bianchi shares the answers she and others found in a recent…

Explore claims of extraterrestrial life and our efforts to communicate with inhabitants of worlds outside our solar system. Even though there's no "proof positive" for extraterrestrial life-forms of any flavor, we've set the stage for applying a battery of critical-thinking skills to the valid analysis of scientific data. (Contains 3 figures and 5…

In the current teaching activities on curriculum, teachers taught all kinds of computer language at the most of the time. Students also focus on a variety of examinations, but the real time to train students' independent software developing skill is very limited. This has resulted in the students only to copy other people's systems design ideas,…

The inquiry approach to learning is based on three phases. The exploratory phase encourages students to investigate a particular topic; the invention phase asks students to consider what they have learned; the final phase assists students in discovering the inadequacies of their inventions. (JN)

Pullout pages provide suggestions for teaching elementary students at all levels about the wonders of human ingenuity. The suggestions help students see that great ideas come from the need to solve real-life problems and that one great idea leads to another, so current inventions help predict future inventions. (SM)

This study concerns a moment in the learning process which is considered crucial, namely, that point when the learner is confronted with the necessity of discovering from the models already learned and stored in memory elements that will be useful in constructing a new utterance or solving a new problem. The emphasis is on the point of connection…

Contains suggestions for improving writing instruction and stimulating student interest in writing. Suggests contest writing, using the poem "Jabberwocky" for vocabulary development, and an activity for structuring creative thinking. (JT)

Courses designed to teach problem-solving and creativity, which are relatively new additions to college curricula, are discussed, along with their intellectual foundations and research on these two processes. The teaching of these processes involves the following course goals: teaching a specific subject, generally useful skills, and professional…

Background information to help K-12 teachers use objects found in the Smithsonian Institution or in other museums to stimulate students' creative thinking is provided. To encourage creative thinking, teachers must provide students with divergent problems, i.e., problems that are expansive, allow for a variety of responses, and have no fixed…

Museum objects can be the springboard for exercising critical thinking. There are four main thought processes associated with critical thinking: (1) fluent thinking, the ability to produce many ideas; (2) flexible thinking, the ability to view something in different ways; (3) original thinking, the ability to produce unique ideas; and (4)…

AN INQUIRY (SPECIFIC DISCOVERY) APPROACH TO LEARNING WAS SUBJECTED TO A RIGOROUS TEST AND EVALUATION PROGRAM, INVOLVING ELEMENTARY INSTRUCTION IN THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES. STUDENTS IN THE FOURTH, FIFTH, AND SIXTH GRADES SERVED AS SUBJECTS. EVALUATIVE CRITERIA WERE (1) SCIENCE CONCEPT ACHIEVEMENT, (2) DIVERGENT THINKING OR CREATIVITY, AND (3)…

Describes how college science laboratory activities can be developed by student teams in which original questions are formulated as testable hypotheses and refined into experimental designs on the basis of personal observations. Distinguishes this "minds-on" approach from traditional college science laboratories with respect to students'…