International Journal of Science Education

What Makes Creativity Scientific? Recognising and Cultivating Scientific Creativity in Science Education

In this rapidly changing technological and social context, creativity is increasingly recognised as an essential educational goal (Luckin, 2018). It is no longer an optional enrichment outcome, but a capacity needed to participate in scientific, technological, and civic life (OECD, 2024). This is especially relevant to science education, where creativity supports problem-solving, scientific discovery, learner motivation, and academic development (Xu et al., 2025). Yet, despite increasing policy attention and a long history of creativity research within psychology (e.g., Kaufman & Sternberg, 2019), the field has struggled to build a coherent, domain-specific account of what it is trying to cultivate. This challenge stems in part from a persistent conflation of two related but distinct constructs: scientific creativity, the developing capacity enacted through generating, transforming, evaluating, and communicating scientific ideas; and creativity in science education, the broader field concerned with how that capacity is conceptualised, cultivated, recognised, and assessed. This special issue treats that distinction as central, and asks how a clearer account of scientific creativity as a construct can inform a more coherent field of creativity in science education.

What is scientific creativity?

We understand scientific creativity as the capacity to generate, transform, evaluate, and communicate scientific ideas in ways that are both novel and scientifically meaningful (Kind & Kind, 2007). In educational contexts, novelty is judged relative to the learner, not to the discipline as a whole (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009). Scientific meaningfulness does not require immediate canonical correctness: an idea is scientifically meaningful when it remains responsive to evidence and open to scrutiny within the discipline. Scientific creativity becomes evident when students move beyond reproducing established knowledge, and instead develop, test, refine, and justify possible explanations, models, and solutions (Kind & Kind, 2007). It is not simply a fixed individual trait, nor solely a property of a final product; it is enacted through iterative scientific exploration and sensemaking. Cultivating scientific creativity is therefore not peripheral to science learning, but integral to it: through it, students imagine possibilities, construct and revise ideas, and develop increasingly coherent scientific understanding, rather than only reproduce established explanations and procedures.

Why has scientific creativity remained fragmented and marginal in science education?

This lack of clarity about the distinction between scientific creativity and creativity in science education has contributed to fragmentation across science education research. Processes relevant to scientific creativity are studied within modelling, inquiry, argumentation, epistemic practices, design-based learning, tinkering, and collaborative knowledge building, although they are not always identified as scientific creativity. These traditions foreground different dimensions of creative activity: some emphasise generating ideas, others focus on constructing and revising models, designing novel solutions, evaluating competing explanations, or collectively improving knowledge. They also differ in where creativity is located: within individual cognition, social interaction, disciplinary practice, or the products learners create (e.g., Hong et al., 2022). The problem is not this theoretical diversity itself, but that the relationships among these perspectives are rarely made explicit. Consequently, closely related creative processes remain dispersed across literature that does not identify them as scientific creativity, while studies using the term may apply it to substantially different capacities, practices, or outcomes (e.g., Lai et al., 2024; Li et al., 2022; Roth et al., 2022; Wan Hussain et al., 2022). It is therefore unclear whether these traditions examine different forms or components of scientific creativity, or simply offer different lenses on a shared phenomenon. This makes findings difficult to compare or accumulate, and obscures whether different pedagogies and assessments are cultivating and recognising the same construct.

This conceptual uncertainty is also reflected in the limited and sometimes inconsistent guidance available to curriculum designers, schools, and teachers about what scientific creativity looks like in everyday science learning. Studies suggest that teachers often associate scientific creativity primarily with highly open-ended inquiry (McLure et al., 2024; Xu et al., 2025). Such approaches can provide valuable conditions for creative engagement and knowledge construction (e.g., Fredagsvik, 2022). The problem arises, however, when the openness itself is treated as the principal evidence that creativity is occurring. This can obscure more situated forms of scientific creativity, in which learners generate, transform, evaluate, and communicate ideas through explanation, modelling, representation, and problem solving. Extended open-ended activities also demand substantial time, resources, teacher expertise, and flexible assessment, while producing less predictable or standardised outcomes, making them harder to sustain within formal schooling (Beghetto, 2019; McLure et al., 2024). As a result, scientific creativity is often treated as an occasional feature of inquiry or enrichment, rather than a capacity that can be cultivated through everyday disciplinary sensemaking.

This marginal positioning also distributes opportunities unevenly. When creative scientific work is associated primarily with innovation programs, competitions, or extended STEM activities, opportunities may favour students already identified as high achieving or exceptionally capable. Where access depends on prior attainment, teacher nomination, or other conventional indicators of success, learners’ capacity to imagine mechanisms, reconfigure representations, or develop alternative explanations may remain overlooked. Equity concerns extend beyond access to specialised activities. They also concern whose ideas are invited, recognised, and valued as scientifically creative within routine classroom learning. Prevailing expectations about credible explanation, originality, and appropriate scientific expression may make some forms of participation more visible than others. As a result, students may have unequal opportunities both to contribute to creative scientific sensemaking and to have those contributions valued. Limited professional learning, classroom resources, and assessment frameworks can intensify these inequalities, as teachers come to rely more heavily on familiar indicators of achievement and participation.

Aims of the special issue

Given the significance and complexity of this issue, research is needed that keeps the construct and the field analytically distinct while examining how they relate. This special issue is organised around four questions:

(1) Conceptualising scientific creativity: What makes creativity scientific, and how should scientific creativity be differentiated from general creativity and adjacent science education constructs?

(2) Cultivating scientific creativity: Through what classroom practices, interactions, representations, and environments does scientific creativity develop?

(3) Recognising and assessing scientific creativity: What forms of evidence allow researchers and teachers to identify scientific creativity without reducing it to generic divergent-thinking scores?

(4) Participation and recognition in changing scientific and technological contexts: Who is enabled to participate in activities for scientific creativity, whose contributions are recognised, and how are emerging scientific and technological conditions reshaping participation and agency?

 

While the special issue advances a disciplinary and epistemic framing of scientific creativity, it does not assume that any single theoretical account can capture all of its forms. We invite contributions that extend, refine, compare, or critically challenge present thinking and practice, provided they make explicit how scientific creativity is defined, where it is located analytically, and what evidence supports the claims made. These questions can be explored across diverse theoretical traditions, educational levels, and cultural contexts, and across formal, informal, disciplinary or interdisciplinary settings. Through this collection, we aim not for theoretical uniformity, but for a more coherent account of scientific creativity built on shared questions and points of comparison.

 

 

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References

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