Board 366: Rebuilding and Reinforcing Creativity through Assessment in Engineering Students and Practitioners

Bret N Lingwall,; Andrea E Surovek,; Roni Reiter-Palmon

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Conference: 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Baltimore , Maryland
Publication Date: June 25, 2023
Start Date: June 25, 2023
End Date: June 28, 2023
Conference Session: NSF Grantees Poster Session
Tagged Topic: NSF Grantees Poster Session
Page Count: 4
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--43028
Permanent URL: https://strategy.asee.org/43028
Download Count: 118

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Dr. Surovek is the Director of the New Office of faculty Development and Advancement at South Dakota Mines. Her research interests include engineering creativity and pedagogy.

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Roni Reiter-Palmon

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Abstract

When Cropley and Cropley proposed promotion of creativity through assessment, they did so in terms of individuals in the general population. Engineering students and practitioners, however, can be a different sort of person as individuals and even more so in team settings. One side effect of the conventional engineering education as currently construed… that trains the forming engineer to seek the “right” solution in the most “efficient” manner possible, is that creativity can be stripped away. Creativity itself is often misunderstood. Here we define creativity in terms of both novelty and quality. To solve the complex, wicked, problems of the next 100 years, engineers must be able to seek novel solutions that are of high quality (i.e., creative). We use the idea of promotion of creativity through assessment and use it to rebuild creativity in both engineering students and practitioners and subsequently reinforce the mindsets and skills via both rubrics and assessments combined with facilitated learning experiences. Need: High school students consistently score higher in creativity than engineering graduates, particularly in team settings, even when corrected for demographics. This leads to increasingly derivative design work and marginally incremental advancements of the states of the practice and art. We see Senior Design engineering students consistently only doing that which they saw in either class or an internship rather than seeking novel solutions or high quality. Guiding Question: We pose that in facilitated developmental experiences wherein students are guided through interactive active learning activities using complex problems and guided by rubrics that creativity can be rebuilt and reinforced. Outcomes: Through 18 months of work on this project, a creativity assessment rubric developed and validated by previous research (the CASPER) has been implemented in facilitated developmental experiences in several cohorts of freshmen and seniors in general design courses as well as technical design courses. Teams have been emphasized, while individuals not neglected. Assessments of design processes and products before and after interventions on these and other cohorts (for baselines) have shown that interventions are promising for rebuilding and reinforcing creativity in engineers.

Citation
Format

Lingwall,, B. N., & Surovek,, A. E., & Reiter-Palmon, R. (2023, June), Board 366: Rebuilding and Reinforcing Creativity through Assessment in Engineering Students and Practitioners Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--43028

TY - CPAPER
AB - When Cropley and Cropley proposed promotion of creativity through assessment, they did so in terms of individuals in the general population. Engineering students and practitioners, however, can be a different sort of person as individuals and even more so in team settings. One side effect of the conventional engineering education as currently construed… that trains the forming engineer to seek the “right” solution in the most “efficient” manner possible, is that creativity can be stripped away. Creativity itself is often misunderstood. Here we define creativity in terms of both novelty and quality. To solve the complex, wicked, problems of the next 100 years, engineers must be able to seek novel solutions that are of high quality (i.e., creative). We use the idea of promotion of creativity through assessment and use it to rebuild creativity in both engineering students and practitioners and subsequently reinforce the mindsets and skills via both rubrics and assessments combined with facilitated learning experiences.
Need: High school students consistently score higher in creativity than engineering graduates, particularly in team settings, even when corrected for demographics. This leads to increasingly derivative design work and marginally incremental advancements of the states of the practice and art. We see Senior Design engineering students consistently only doing that which they saw in either class or an internship rather than seeking novel solutions or high quality.
Guiding Question: We pose that in facilitated developmental experiences wherein students are guided through interactive active learning activities using complex problems and guided by rubrics that creativity can be rebuilt and reinforced.
Outcomes: Through 18 months of work on this project, a creativity assessment rubric developed and validated by previous research (the CASPER) has been implemented in facilitated developmental experiences in several cohorts of freshmen and seniors in general design courses as well as technical design courses. Teams have been emphasized, while individuals not neglected. Assessments of design processes and products before and after interventions on these and other cohorts (for baselines) have shown that interventions are promising for rebuilding and reinforcing creativity in engineers.
AU - Bret N Lingwall, P.E.
AU - Andrea E Surovek, P.E.
AU - Roni Reiter-Palmon
CY - Baltimore , Maryland
DA - 2023/06/25
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Board 366: Rebuilding and Reinforcing Creativity through Assessment in Engineering Students and Practitioners
UR - https://strategy.asee.org/43028
DO - 10.18260/1-2--43028
ER -