The purpose of these studies was to investigate creativity in the elementary classroom. The first study cross-culturally explored mainland Chinese and United States of America (USA) elementary teachers' perceptions of how various classroom activities contribute to student creativity, and how often they reported engaging their students in these activities. The second study, primarily a cultural comparison study, conceptually replicated in mainland China the work by Beghetto, Kaufman, and Baxter (2011). This work examined the relationship between elementary students' mini-c creative self-efficacy (CSE), their demographic characteristics, and teacher ratings of students' creative expression during science instruction. This study expanded the original work by collecting additional teacher level data to examine the relationship between teachers' beliefs that they encourage mini-c creativity and their class' mean mini-c CSE during science instruction. The third study in this dissertation explored the relationship between mini-c creativity and teachers' conceptions of Nature of Science aspect of creativity and imagination). Teachers were asked additional open-ended questions about what they do to encourage student understanding of this NOS concept. Results from these three studies indicated cross-cultural support for creativity in the classroom. These Chinese and American teachers have positive perceptions of practices that contribute to student creativity and are actively nurturing creativity in the classroom through a variety of methods. Additionally, the participating mainland Chinese teachers have adequate conceptions of creativity and imagination in NOS and are actively encouraging student understanding of this concept. Contributions and practical implications are discussed.
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