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This quantitative research examined factors that affect elementary students' creativity and how those factors correlate. Aiming to identify significant factors that affect creativity and to clarify the relationship between these factors by path analysis, this research was designed to be a stepping stone for creativity enhancement studies. Data were gathered from 208 students in 3 fifth-grade classes and 3 sixth-grade classes in 5 different schools located in Seoul, Korea. Survey questions, asked through five-score Likert-scale items, focused on attentiveness in science class, creativity and scientific attitude, which has been shown by the literature to have positive influences on one another. The findings include that their scientific attitude, attentiveness, and creativity correlated with significance, where gender did not have an effect on the relationship. Gender and age of the students have shown no significant effect on their scientific attitude, attentiveness or creativity. Scientific attitude, attentiveness and creativity have demonstrated positive effects to each other, the effect being stronger from scientific attitude to creativity (0.659) than the other two, attentiveness & scientific attitude (0.32) and attentiveness & creativity (0.368). Scientific attitude affects creativity most directly (0.659), and attentiveness would affect creativity more as a cofactor next to the scientific attitude (0.213) rather than when it's by itself (0.154). That is, if a teacher devises a certain way to enhance attentiveness of students during their science class, their scientific attitude and attentiveness would increase, giving them a solid chance to enhance their creativity consequently.

In this study, we explored the development of scientific model through the social-construction process on "combustion." Students were 8th graders from one middle school class. Each student engaged in small group discussions three times and made a group model on combustion. Discourses between peers and teacher were videotaped, audiotaped, and transcribed. The results show that the small groups constructed an initial concept: 'Conditions of combustion', which they then evaluated and revised the initial concept through combustion experiment. Following the discussions, some small groups evaluated their model and made a revised model. Then, the small groups compared various models and constructed a scientific model through consensus within the small group and as a whole class. Finally, students kept revising their model to 'Burning needs oxygen.' This tells us that the social construction process of scientific model made a meaningful role to build scientific model through diverse discussion between the students and their teacher, although they have had some difficult process to reach the final consensus. The data also showed some group features: the members were open to other's ideas. They analyzed the differences between their own ideas from others and revised their model after the whole class discussion. Lastly, they showed the tendency to make a good use of teacher's guidance. This study implies the importance of having social interaction process for students to understand the scientific model and learn the nature of scientific inquiry in class.

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