Revisiting Peirce’s account of scientific creativity to inform classroom practice

Abstract

Peirce made repeated attempts to clarify what he understood as abduction or creative reasoning in scientific discoveries. In this article, we draw on past and recent scholarship on Peirce’s later accounts of abduction to put a case for how teachers can apply his ideas productively to elicit and guide student creative reasoning in the science classroom. We focus on (a) his rationale for abduction, (b) conditions he recognised as necessary to support this speculative reasoning, (c) pragmatic strategies to guide inquiry and test conjectural hypotheses, and (d) his growing recognition of creative dimensions to reasoning beyond abductive inference-making. We illustrate this case through examples of a guided inquiry approach to student claim-making in the science classroom.

Keywords:

• Peirce
• creativity
• reasoning
• science education

Notes

1 These unpublished manuscripts are held in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and are unsighted by the authors of this paper who rely on the readings of Pietarinen and Bellucci.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joseph Paul Ferguson

Joseph Paul Ferguson is a research fellow in the School of Education at Deakin University. He is interested in exploring the use of video-based methodologies to investigate student reasoning in science, in particular abductive reasoning as part of the discovery process. He is also interested in the way in which film studies can inform the use of video in educational research. Joseph also has an interest in the interaction between religion and science in the classroom.

Vaughan Prain

Vaughan Prain is a Professor in Science Interdisciplinary Education Research, Deakin University. He has extensive experience in researching innovative teaching and learning approaches in primary and secondary science. He has focused particularly in recent years on students learning through engaging with representational affordances within and across visual, spatial, linguistic and embodied modes as students construct accounts of scientific processes and claims. This has led to increased interest in the conditions, tasks, and learning sequences that support student multi-modal and creative reasoning. This focus on diversification of problem-solving purposes and use of richer resources has prompted awareness of generative synergies with arts practices, leading to further curricular innovation.