Abstract:

Imagination has been held to contribute to creativity on generating pre-inventive structures. How do teachers design their creative teaching with imagination? How could we inspire imagination for teacher education to cultivate creative teachers? The goal of these series of studies intended to answer these questions. In study 1, nine recognized creative teachers in Taiwan participated in the thinking aloud task to clarify how imagination works in their teaching design. The protocols analysis revealed six operations of imagination, including expand, combination, connection, disassociation, transformation, manipulation and interaction of all operations. In study 2, teachers applied the six operations of imagination to design eight classes (each class contained two hours) for junior students. The imagination test and imaginative traits questionnaire were administrated for pre and post test. The results of ANOVA analysis indicated that the both scores (imagination and imaginative traits) of post-test were significantly higher than pre-test. In study 3, the effect of imagination inspiration for teachers on creative scientific-story writing was explored. Thirty-seven pre-service teachers enrolled the study and were randomly assigned to experimental and contrast group by the pre-test of imagination test. All of the subjects had to generate scientific instructional stories on computer, which topic was about understanding three states of water and valuing water resource. The experimental group can generate their ideas by using imaginative inspiration cards that inducing the imagination, such as expanding, connecting, combining, transforming, disassociating and so on. Quantitative and qualitative analysis both conducted to obtain supportive evidences of our imaginative inspiration. The results indicated that pre-service teachers in experimental groups produced more imaginative stories than those in control group. Besides, pre-service teachers received experimental treatment showed high quality on their story writing. These findings offered practical evidences for instructional design in science and future study.

Keywords:

Imagination, scientific story for instruction, imaginative inspiration, creativity.