Therese N Hopfenbeck, Tracey Denton-Calabrese, Samantha-Kaye Johnston, Juliet Scott-Barrett and Joshua A McGrane - Oxford University Centre for Educational Assessment, University of Oxford
The purpose of this study was to understand how teachers from diverse contexts endeavour to facilitate curiosity and creativity among International Baccalaureate (IB) Primary Years Programme (PYP) students. Funded with generous support by the Jacobs Foundation, a research team at the Oxford University Centre for Educational Assessment conducted a multi-site, international study across 9 countries and 9 schools. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the research team had to pivot from the original plan of visiting schools. As a result, the study makes a significant methodological contribution to classroom research with a novel and flexible approach to collaborating with teachers online, using teacher-captured video recordings to understand how they facilitate curiosity and creativity. In addition to the teacher videos, researchers collected data from online consultations, student creativity and curiosity tasks, and teacher and student interviews. Based on the findings, the research team identified five promising practices that may support the development of student curiosity and creativity: diversifying feedback pathways, encouraging self-regulated learning, nurturing an inquisitive mind, facilitating creative collaboration and exercising choice over self-expression. Further research is required to validate these promising practices and assess their long-term impact.
Research summary (PDF, 2.6 MB)
Related study
The Jacobs Foundation also funded a related study on creativity and curiosity, which was conducted by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). The study entitled, Development of a transcript to record learner creativity and curiosity, can be found here.
