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Fostering creativity is vital for tackling 21st-century challenges, and education plays a key role in nurturing this skill. According to the associative theory, creativity involves connecting distant concepts in semantic memory. Here, we explore how semantic memory changes following an educational intervention intended to promote creativity. Specifically, we examine how a scientific education curriculum—Scientific Creativity in Practice (SCIP) program—impacts the semantic memory networks of 10–18-year-old students in a chemistry class (n = 176). Students in an Intervention group who received the SCIP intervention, and a Control group who did not, completed creative thinking tests, as well as verbal fluency tasks to estimate semantic networks in science-specific (chemistry) and domain-general (animal) categories. Results showed that the SCIP intervention enhanced performance on one test of scientific creative thinking but showed no significant difference on another. Using network science methods, we observed increased interconnectedness in both science-specific and domain-general categories, with lower path distances between concepts and reduced modularity. These traits define a ‘small-world’ network, balancing connections between closely related and remote concepts. Notably, the chemistry semantic network showed substantially more reorganization, consistent with the chemistry contents of the SCIP intervention. The findings suggest that semantic memory reorganization may be a cognitive mechanism underlying successful creativity interventions in science education.
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Reality-Drag: Scientific Realism as a set of practices that achieve realness
We propose that reality is not the sort of thing that is out there in the world waiting to be discovered by scientists but is instead performatively constituted. What we mean by something being performatively constituted borrows from drag. We suggest that the reality relied upon as the basis for experimentation and technological interventions exists as a performative project, and analyse the work of science as reality-drag. We posit that performing and achieving realness happens as part of drag, but also in scientific practice and in particular through devising scientific categories and concepts. For instance, science-drag is performed in the making of scientific kinds and categories that aim to capture the ontological structure of the world (kinding). Science-drag is also performed in the generation of scientific concepts from everyday ideas (founding). We explore these performances in the case of food and agriculture, especially in the generation of plant-based meats.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2240749
- PAR ID:
- 10527157
- Publisher / Repository:
- European Philosophy of Science Association
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- 9th Annual European Philosophy of Science Association. Zadužbina Ilije M. Kolarca. Belgrade, Serbia.
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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