Developing Physics learning activities for fostering student creativity in Hong Kong context

This study aims at developing a set of learning activities that foster student creativity and can be infused into Physics curricula of Hong Kong. First, based on creativity literature in western countries, a set of creative learning objectives is developed. For developing and choosing suitable strategies and activities, a set of rationales that suit Hong Kong context is then suggested. Based on these rationales and learning objectives, a set of learning strategies with some exemplar activities in Physics content are developed.

After the exemplars of activities are developed, they are tried-out in two secondary classes in Hong Kong, and are introduced to 120 senior Physics teachers in Hong Kong. The feedbacks of both the secondary students and teachers are collected and analyzed to evaluate the suitability and usefulness of this set of activities.

Based on the books of Cropley (2001) and Starko (2001), and other literature reviewed in previous section, the following learning objectives are proposed for fostering creativity in Physics learning. They involve both cognitive and affective learning objectives. The first cognitive objective is nurturing the divergent thinking abilities of students, including fluency (able to generate many idea), flexibility (able to generate many different types of ideas, or ideas from many different perspectives), novelty (able to generate unusual and novel ideas), and elaboration (able to add details to improve ideas). Besides divergent thinking abilities, the instructional designs developed by this study also aim at fostering students' sensitivity (being observant, intuitive, quick and capable in discovering changes, differences and problems), imagination (able to think into the future, impossible, and unknown), and synthesis (able to integrate divergent and convergent thinking, and basic knowledge and skills to produce creative products).

In affective aspects, the learning activities aim at cultivating students' motives in creative thinking, including their interest, confidence and value in creative thinking. Other positive attitudes favoring creativity development, including an appreciation and aspiration of creativity, being curious and imaginative, favoring challenges, willing to take sensible risks, are also targeted at in this study.

Besides these basic cognitive and affective attributes, the instructional designs developed by this study also aim at equipping students with some special thinking strategies, like brainstorming, free association, mind-map, forced association, metaphoric thinking, and creative problem-solving. To enhance all-round development, this study develops activities that foster creativity in multiple intelligence domains, including the spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, linguistic and other domains.

The above mentioned are mainly learning objectives of general creativity education. Some learning objectives are specifically designed for enhancing creativity in science domain. Unlike some program for gifted youth, this study does not aim at training students to produce novel and important piece of work in Physics. Instead, it targets at cultivating creative attitudes towards Physics, including creating an image that Physics is a creative endeavor; Physics is everywhere in our daily-life and it has infinite possibilities. Since Physics is a subject that emphasizes scientific investigation, this study also includes fostering creativity in various science process skills as its learning objectives. Students are trained to be more creative in questioning, generating hypotheses, designing experiments, and other necessary skills in open-inquiry process.

Besides fulfilling the above learning objectives, the creative learning activities suggested by this study need to suit the local context. A set of rationales for designing the creative Physics activities is suggested below.

First of all, to allow room for creative thinking, the tasks involved must be highly open-ended, with large solution spans. They should be of medium level of difficulties to provide acceptable challenges, and able to encourage student to take sensible risks.

If possible, playful, affective, personal and daily-life elements should be induced into the activities to make them interesting and appealing to students, and, at the same time, elicit motivation to create. And, of course, teachers need to ensure that students have equipped with sufficient Physics knowledge to engage in the tasks.

Besides fulfilling the requirements of creative learning, the design of the activities also need to cope with the various constraints in the existing Physics learning contexts of Hong Kong. In the beginning stage, we better avoid inducing great or comprehensive changes to the existing curriculum designs or to the "normal teaching" (in teachers' wording). To achieve this, the creative activities should be integrated into the knowledge content of the existing Physics curricula. Participating these activities would not only enhance creative thinking but also knowledge understanding. At the same time, the activities should be simple and flexible. They better can be finished within 10 to 20 minutes in classroom. If not, then the activities better can be completed by students independently with only a simple worksheet or guideline at home. Both the production and sharing of student work are convenient and quick.

Due to the lack of resources and the low student learning skills, several criteria become important in designing the activities. Advanced practical skills, rare resources and large physical place should not be required in doing the activities. Emphasis should be put on toying of ideas, instead of routine hands-on work. Even if there is practical work, it is better to be very simple, using mostly everyday resources. Besides being careful in designing practical work, teachers should pay special attention to the demand in students' communication and cooperation skills. The methods of communication should be easy and flexible, and avoid creating additional working pressure to students. As far as possible, both the questions and the possible answers are short and easy to understand or express. The activities have the flexibility of allowing students to express their ideas either in written, verbal, or diagrammatic ways. Wrong words or grammars are allowed. Quality of presentation is not counted in assessing student performance. Besides, complex cooperation skills should also be avoided. Though Foster (1985) proposed that cooperative group setting can improve creative thinking in science learning, however, complicated cooperative group work may increase the difficulties of beginners. Preferably, the activities have flexibility in using both group and individual work. That means, either mode of learning can lead to satisfactory performance, and teachers can choose the most suitable mode for their students.

Finally, for wide dissemination of the creative learning ideas in Hong Kong, the activities suggested need to be easily understood, designed and conducted by normal teachers with no special learning background in creativity. For example, teachers may not know what is meant by SCAMPER, though it is a common strategy in creativity field. Activities adopting this strategy are not suitable at this preliminary stage.

Adopting the rationales described, this study develops the learning activities in the following ways. First, it starts with the common teaching activities, like questioning, giving examples, explaining phenomenon, and doing experiments. In the past, teachers would ask questions and give explanations, but now students are asked to do these tasks. In short, the first method is simply reversing the role of teachers and students -- changing teacher activities in conventional classroom to student activities.

Second, it induces more freedom of exploration and self-directed elements into the inquiry, discovery and problem-solving process. In the past, teachers gave detailed guidelines and procedures and students do the "cook-book" experiments, but now teachers ask students to design both the purposes and methods of the experiments. Students are given some ill-structured and daily-life problems to start the inquiry or problem-solving work. The tasks have room for diversified answers, and yet, they are simple and can be completed quickly in classroom (at least for the thinking part of it) or independently at home. To achieve this, the original creative problem solving and open inquiry model are simplified, and simple procedures are put down in worksheet form.

Third, this study purposely induces divergent thinking training in nearly all tasks suggested. In the past, teachers were contended with one or a few correct answers in student work, but now teachers encourage the expression of fluency, flexibility, novelty and elaboration in student work. For simple tasks, a large number of answers are requested to stimulate fluency. The tasks would request either 10 or more answers in individual work, and 20 or more answers in group work. Sometimes, they simply state that "give as many answers as possible". For difficult or complicated tasks, only one single but novel and imaginative answer is requested. In fact, the number of answers requested depends on the difficulties of the questions. For encouraging flexibility and elaboration, students are explicitly asked to give more different categories of answer, to change directions, or to give more details and elaborations of the answers. In short, common tasks can also foster divergent thinking abilities, provided additional instructions on answering are given.

In strict sense, the above three methods are not creating totally new instructional designs, but modifying existing ones to give more room for creative thinking. However, in this study, some new activities need to be developed to achieve the specific learning objectives described in previous section. For example, to encourage student flexibility, some unusual way of questioning, that forced students to deviate from the norm, are suggested. The instructional designs include questioning in reverse manner, asking students to redesign some standard experiments, rewrite standard theories or ideas, adding and eliminating some well-accepted things. To encourage imagination, students are asked to make predictions and answer some "suppose" or "what if" questions. To encourage sensitivity, teaches ask students to use their five senses and their intuition to make guess, to discover phenomena, problems, uncertainties, discrepancies and changes that are difficult to be discovered. To encourage creative expression in multiple intelligence domains, students are asked to express their physics understandings in creative writing, drama, role-play, models, drawings, and the other ways. To equip with some idea-generating heuristics, activities like creating analogies, comparing metaphors, and making invention by forced association are proposed.

After reading the above paragraphs or the simple exemplars suggested in next section, one may think that creative Physics activities are rather easy to design. However, this may not always be true. Most of the tasks in the traditional science textbooks have only one solution. To elicit creative thinking, tasks involved need to have many possible solutions. It is sometimes difficult to modify them to include large solution span. Even though the creative tasks need to be so open-ended, and yet they need to be specific and concrete so that students feel easy to start with and quick to finish. Moreover, the best activities are those that can give a surprise to students. These activities involve questions that students have never thought of, but when they start to think, most students can find a lot of amazing answers that are unexpected to them. Besides these demanding and nearly contradictory criteria, the tasks need to fulfill the many other criteria mentioned in last section. How can this be achieved? The last method suggested by this study for designing activities is "brainstorming". For each kind of instructional design, a large number of possible tasks are brainstormed, and only tasks that fulfilled most of the criteria are finally chosen.

Following the methods described in previous sections, a number of creative learning activities are developed for everyday Physics lessons. They are listed in Table 1, according to their major learning objectives designed to achieve. Besides the major objective indicated in the table, these activities may also enhance other cognitive and affective objectives.

Table 1. Suggested list of learning activities for fostering creativity in Physics

Major learning objectives	Learning activities
1. Curiosity & free association	Free questioning, mind-map,
2. Fluency	Brainstorm multiple examples, multiple experimental methods, and multiple research questions
3. Flexibility	Re-design standard items, reverse thinking
4. Sensitivity	Make guess with direct senses or intuition, problem-finding, open discovery
5. Imagination	Make predictions, answer "suppose/ what if" questions
6. Metaphoric thinking	Create analogies or metaphors, compare the similarities and differences of two loosely-related concepts
7. Creativity in multiple intelligences	Construct models, draw pictures or diagrams, creative writing, creative dramatics (e.g. role-play)
8. Special idea-generating strategies	e.g. Invention using "forced association" or "adding and eliminating"method
9. Advanced synthetic thinking	Open inquiry, creative problem-solving, system design

With reference to the present Physics syllabuses of Hong Kong, exemplars of creative learning activities are developed. Some of them are listed in Table 2.

Learning activities	Exemplars in Physics
Free questioning	Q1. What you wish to know around this toy trick? Try to ask as many questions as you can.(at least 50!)
Mind-map	Q2. What do you think of when I say "mechanics". Draw a mind-map around it.
Multiple examples	Q3. Write down as many examples of friction as you can. (can be a hundred !)
Multiple research questions	Q4. If you can go to a new planet, what scientific questions do you want to research ?
Multiple experimental methods	Q5. Develop, at least, 10 methods to illustrate the principle of lever with everyday objects.
Re-designing standard / well-known items	Q6. Find an alternative method to illustrate the theory demonstrated by Galileo's thought experiment.
Reverse thinking	Q7. How to increase energy loss in a machine? Invent a machine(e.g. pulley system) that you think is the "worst".
Making guess (using direct senses or intuition)	Q9. If a ball falls freely from a 10 storey-high building, how long it would take to reach the ground. Explain why you make such a guess.
Problem-finding	Q8. After connecting to a resistor, the pointer of the multi-meter does not move. Suggest 10 possible reasons.
Open discovery	Q17. Try to discover as many physical phenomena as you can in your home toilet.
Making prediction	Q10. What advancements do you think we would have in telecommunication 100 years later ?
Suppose/ what if	Q11. Suppose there is no gravity, describe how the world would be like? Give 10 possible happenings
Designing models	Q12. Suggest a new diagrammatic representation for the concept "field"
Creative writing	Q13. Write a passage starting with "I am an air particle in a sound wave..."
Creative drama	Q14. Role-play the longitudinal and transverse wave
Metaphoric comparison	Q15. Give 5 similarities and 5 differences between force and love
Creating analogies	Q16. Suggest an analogy for internal temperature, heat and temperature. Explain your answer.
Invention -- brainstorming	Q17. Please design 3 electric/ electronic inventions so as to make your toilet more comfortable, convenient or useful.
Invention-- adding & eliminating	Q18. Suggest one electronic/ electric devices in laboratory which you wish to add or eliminate. Give your reasons.
Invention - forced association	Q19. Combining shoes with magnet/ motor/ thermometer/..., suggest 10 possible inventions.
Open inquiry	Q 20. There are two kinds of light bulbs. Design 3 different methods to test which one is "better".
Creative problem - solving	Q21. Many people died in fire. How to help them? Adopt a simplified CPS model to solve this problem.
System design	Q22. Design a system for human beings to live on the moon. Describe its elements and their interactions in the system.

Some suggested activities were tried-out in two senior science classes in Hong Kong. These activities were packed together and conducted to the students in several lessons by the researcher. Form 6 classes in two secondary schools were chosen. The schools chosen are of fairly good academic level with not much problems in discipline and writing. In the try-out, students were instructed to brainstorm as many answers as they can, and encouraged to express their ideas in simplest and quickest ways. Instructions like "There is no right and wrong answers, any reasonable answers are accepted. It does not matter to have wrong words or Chinese mixed with English in your answers." were given. Conductor of the activities had tried to promote a game-like, encouraging but challenging atmosphere by saying something like "today, we play something like this..."; "we have a little competition to see who got the most answers..."; "this question should have more than fifty answers...", "Good, someone already get ten, how about you?" After trying each question, there was a simple sharing and discussion either in small groups or with the whole class.

After finishing all the exercises, students were asked to give some written feedback on the activities. Questions included "what are your feeling towards these exercises?", "how are they different from exercises in normal Physics lessons?", and "what you have learnt in doing these exercises?". The feedbacks of the students were analyzed and summarized.

The complete set of creative activities developed was introduced to 120 senior Physics teachers in three teacher training workshops. This teacher sample comes from 120 different secondary schools, and can be considered as a good representation of Physics teachers in Hong Kong.

Each teacher participated a three-hour workshop, in which, the teachers first tried these activities themselves. The workshop also included a brief discussion on how these activities are designed and the sharing of student answers and feedback in doing these activities. After gaining substantial understanding of the activities, the teachers were asked to respond to a questionnaire that evaluates their opinions on the suggested activities. The questionnaire includes 38 items in a 7-point Likert scale. For example, teachers were asked to indicate whether they strongly agree, agree, slightly agree, have no idea, slightly disagree, disagree or strongly disagree with statement like "This kind of activities is suitable to students in my classes". In the same questionnaire, these teachers were also asked to indicate whether they would implement these activities in their future teaching, and respond to an open-ended question "after this workshop, what changes you expect you would have in your Physics teaching?".