In Search of the Creative Scientific Personality

Abstract

IN SEARCH OF THE CREATIVE SCIENTIFIC PERSONALITY by Maya V. Grosul This study investigates whether personality is a valid predictor of creativity in science above and beyond demographic characteristics, such as career age, gender, and scientific discipline. Creativity is an act of making something new, original, and useful. Creative achievement in science is the personal ability to generate original, useful, and adaptive scientific theories, research methods, or empirical findings. Personality characteristics can operate as valid predictors of creative achievement in science. This study surveyed 145 scientists throughout the United States. Total creativity index was computed by standardizing and summing the total number of publications, total number of citations, h-index, and Soler's creativity index. As expected, openness and neuroticism were significantly positively correlated to creativity in science, while, interestingly, psychoticism was negatively correlated with creativity. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Even though my name appears on the cover of this thesis, a great number of people are responsible for this production. First, I would like to express my tremendous gratitude to my advisor Dr. Gregory Feist, whose intelligence, knowledge, and enthusiasm guided me through the exceptional journey of research in psychology. Dr. Feist gave me the opportunity to develop myself as a researcher. His own contribution to the field of psychology of science was a great inspiration for me. I would also like to thank Dr. Ronald Rogers, whose guidance helped me to develop my knowledge and understanding of research methods. He taught me how to think as a scientist. His indispensable input helped me to improve this work greatly. I also would like to thank Dr. Clifton Oyamot, whose valuable and thoughtful feedback helped me to develop better understanding of my topic. I also would like to thank Dr. Howard Tokunaga, who guided me through the art of statistics and Dr. Chancellor-Freeland who helped me to catch the neuroscience bug. I sincerely wish to thank my classmate Sarah Greene, whose assistance, energy, and encouragement helped me on various occasions. Very special thanks to my husband Alexander Grosul, whose valuable input, understanding, healthy criticism, and unwavering faith in me helped me to accomplish this milestone. I am indebted to my parents Vasily and Ludmila, my husband's parents Leonid and Tatiana, and my sister-in-law Oksana for their unconditional love, support,

The Effect of Engineering Design Based Science Teaching on Decision Making, Scientific Creativity and Design Skills of Classroom Teacher Candidates

“…In addition, the literature also put forwards that problem solving, producing hypotheses and creating designs in the engineering design process are related to scientific creativity (Lin et al, 2003). Grosul (2010) associates the transfer of creativity to life by combining it with scientific theories with scientific creativity. Similarly, Dağlıoğlu (2010) defines creativity as individuals' thinking of new things, integrating these into their lives and creating innovations.…”

Tinjauan Terhadap Profil Personaliti Pensyarah Universiti Penyelidikan

“…Soal selidik ini telah diguna pakai secara meluas dalam penyelidikan di serata dunia dan dilaporkan mempunyai kesahan dan tahap kebolehpercayaan yang tinggi iaitu nilai alfa antara .80 hingga .90 (Mansoor Momeni et al, 2011;Grosul, 2010;John dan Srivastava, 1999;John, Naumann & Soto, 2008). Menurut Novikova (2013), five-factor model atau dikenali sebagai Big Five merupakan model berkaitan personaliti yang paling berpengaruh dalam kajian bidang psikologi.…”

Investigating Scientific Creativity Level of Seventh Grade Students

“…For this reason, scientific creativity can be studied in its own. The previous research shows that scientific creativity is related with some factors including problem solving, problem finding, formulating hypotheses, using analogies along with some personality factors such as motivation (Feist,1998;Grosul, 2010;Liang, 2002;Dunbar, 2000). Scientific creativity can be defined as, depending on previous experiences and knowledge, sensitivity to problems and their solutions, understanding nature of the science and fascinating with it, and development of new, extraordinary and useful scientific knowledge, experiments, theories and products.…”