Abstract: Introduction
As a mental tool used to help learners’ knowledge construction and representation, Concept Map is a graphical representation of knowledge that is comprised of concepts and the relationships between them. Concept mapping not only displays learners’ organized knowledge, but also represents their creativity. lnterdisciplinary concept mapping encourages learners to integrate knowledge from a wider range of disciplines, making meaningful learning more possible. The aims of present study were to further identify the relationship between interdisciplinary concept mapping abilities and creativity. In addition, this study attempted to clarify whether students who perform differently in constructing an interdisciplinary concept map possessed differing capacities for creative thinking.
Method
The participants were 108 eleventh grades from two scientific classes at a senior high school in Shanxi, China, including 60(56%) boys and 48(44%) girls. The average age of the participants was 17.64 years (SD=0.33years). Using the three tasks of interdisciplinary concept mapping designed in the field of science (Task one, Solution Electrical Conductivity; Task two, Properties and Uses of CO2 and Carbon Circulation; Task three, Energy Transformation and Chemical Change) and Scientific Creativity Test (SCT) by Hu and Adey (2002), the study examined students’ interdisciplinary concept mapping abilities and their creative thinking skills, respectively. Participants received about 60-minute instruction session by the second researcher before the experiments. The instruction sessions were designed to help the participants understand the meaning of creativity and interdisciplinary concept mapping and the way in which an interdisciplinary concept map is made. The procedure and time distribution were as follow: (a) Introduction to the concepts of creativity: 10 minutes; (b) Employment of the SCT: 60 minutes; (c) Hand out advance organizer materials of interdisciplinary concept mapping; (d) Introduction to what a interdisciplinary concept map is and how it is constructed: 20 minutes; (e) Practices and discussion of a task involving interdisciplinary concept mapping in small groups of 4 or 5 students: 30 minutes; (f) Three tasks for individual concept mapping: 30 minutes/task. Canonical correlation analysis and discriminate analysis were employed in data analyses.
Results
The results indicated that: (a) the abilities of interdisciplinary concept mapping and scientific creativity had a strong positive correlation; (b) there is a strong positive correlation between propositions generation and cross-links identification, on the one hand, and fluency, flexibility and originality of scientific creativity, on the other; cross-links identification had a strong positive correlation with originality; (c) individual differences in the ability to construct interdisciplinary concept map reflected on all indices of scientific creativity.
Conclusions
The findings suggested that interdisciplinary concept mapping and scientific creative thinking shared similar mental capacities; interdisciplinary concept mapping, which fostered interdisciplinary information integration and knowledge construction, could be an efficient mental tool in understanding a learner’s creative thinking. Therefore, the study contributed not only to promoting the related studies of interdisciplinary knowledge integration teaching in the field of science, but also to enhancing theoretical construction for scientific creativity cultivation

Key words: words abilities of interdisciplinary concept mapping, cientific creativity, interdisciplinary learning