Towards Mining Creative Thinking Patterns from Educational Data

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel pipeline combining a domain-specific knowledge base, data contextualization, and rule-based learning to mine creative thinking patterns from educational data, aiding instructors in understanding student creativity.

Contribution

It introduces a formalized educational knowledge base and a rule-based approach for mining creative patterns, addressing the challenge of analyzing educational data for creativity insights.

Findings

Effective identification of creative thinking patterns from real-world educational data

The pipeline helps instructors understand student creativity better

Demonstrated the approach's applicability with real datasets

Abstract

Creativity, i.e., the process of generating and developing fresh and original ideas or products that are useful or effective, is a valuable skill in a variety of domains. Creativity is called an essential 21st-century skill that should be taught in schools. The use of educational technology to promote creativity is an active study field, as evidenced by several studies linking creativity in the classroom to beneficial learning outcomes. Despite the burgeoning body of research on adaptive technology for education, mining creative thinking patterns from educational data remains a challenging task. In this paper, to address this challenge, we put the first step towards formalizing educational knowledge by constructing a domain-specific Knowledge Base to identify essential concepts, facts, and assumptions in identifying creative patterns. We then introduce a pipeline to contextualize the raw educational data, such as assessments and class activities. Finally, we present a rule-based approach to learning from the Knowledge Base, and facilitate mining creative thinking patterns from contextualized data and knowledge. We evaluate our approach with real-world datasets and highlight how the proposed pipeline can help instructors understand creative thinking patterns from students' activities and assessment tasks.