Meta-analysis of interventions and their effectiveness in students’ scientific creativity

Abstract As the importance of students’ scientific creativity garners increasing attention, many interventions have been designed to cultivate such creativity. To date, however, the available evidence regarding the effectiveness of such interventions has not been systematically reviewed. In this meta-analysis, the results of interventions to improve students’ scientific creativity have been brought together to determine which is the most effective. The analysis is based on 20 outcomes from 17 studies published between 1992 and 2019. Four types of intervention were systematically reviewed: problem-solving, collaborative learning, conceptual construction, and scientific reasoning. The findings demonstrate that problem-solving has a large effect on students’ scientific creativity (g=1.54; n=8), as does scientific reasoning (g=.89; n=3), while collaborative learning has a medium effect (g=0.76, n=6) and conceptual construction has a small effect (g=.20; n=3). In conclusion, this paper found that interventions aimed at cultivating the product dimension of scientific creativity might be most effective in terms of students’ scientific creativity, followed by those based on training traits and process dimension, in that order.