Development of the animated scientific creativity test for children

The purpose of this study was to develop an animated scientific creativity test for K2 students and to investigate its psychometric properties. The Animated Scientific Creativity Test for Children (ASCTC) was developed based on the theoretical framework of the Scientific Discovery as Dual Search Model. The test consists of two components: hypothesis generation and experiment design. Each component includes three open-ended items. All the items are presented through animations. The child watches an animation and then is asked a question about the animation. The test produces fluency, flexibility originality and creativity scores for experiment design and hypothesis generation tasks. In the current study, participants included 801 kindergarten, first and second grade students. Exploratory factor analysis yield a two factor solution, explaining 70.68% of variance. Second-order confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the 2-factorial structure and all fit indices were perfect. For experiment design and hypothesis generation subtest, AVE values were found as .635 and .672 respectively and CR values were found as .839 and .862 respectively. The squareroot of AVE was greater than the correlation coefficient of two factors. These findings showed that the construct validity of the scale was good. For developmental validity, the scores of students at different grade (K2) were compared. Second graders scored higher on ASCTC than first graders and kindergarteners. First graders scored higher on ASCTC than kindergarten students. The test had high correlation with SAGES 2. Additionally, the reliability analysis showed a satisfactory internal consistency (αfluency=.88; αflexibility=.85, αoriginality=.81, αcreativity=.88) and an excellent interscorer consistency (ICC=.98). Keywords: Scientific creativity, Scientific creativity assessment, Animation, Experiment design, Hypothesis generation