How children's creative visual imagination and creative thinking relate to their representation of space

ABSTRACT

This article explores how creative visual imagination and creative thinking can help children to construct mental models of space. A mixed-method study, integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches and involving 98 five-year-old children (54 girls and 44 boys) demonstrated that creative visual imagination, rather than creative thinking, is linked with the knowledge and understanding of space. These results support the notion that creative visual imagination contributes to improvements in children's understanding of basic astronomical concepts. Interestingly, creative thinking was not associated with understanding and knowledge of cosmic phenomena in models taking into account creative imagination. The qualitative analysis showed differences in children's representations of space. We discuss the consequences of these findings for science education, particularly the teaching of elementary astronomy.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative visual imagination
• creative thinking
• mental models of space
• elementary astronomy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Although the upper bound of 95% confidence interval of RMSEA did suggest some misfit, it is well established that RMSEA tends to be biased in studies conducted on small samples (Chen, Curran, Bollen, Kirby, & Paxton, 2008).