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Title: Tools for Assessing the Creative Person, Process, and Product in Engineering Education
WIP: Assessing the Creative Person, Process and Product in Engineering Education This evidence-based practice paper provides guidance in assessing creativity in engineering education. In the last decade, a number of vision statements on the future of engineering education (e.g. Educating the Engineer of 2020, the ASCE Body of Knowledge) point to the fact that creativity is essential to engineering innovation; it is regarded as an important attribute in the education of engineers in order to meet the most urgent national challenges and to drive economic growth in the new millennium. Yet studies suggest that engineering students’ creative skills are being left underdeveloped or diminish over the course of their studies, or worse, that students who consider themselves to be creative are being driven away from engineering as a chosen field. On the surface, creativity skills are perceived as difficult to utilize in the engineering classroom, primarily due to the didactic nature of science and engineering instruction. Assessing the product of open ended or ill-structured assignments remains a difficult task as well. This study examines available assessments for creativity that are founded in three of the Four Ps of creativity: person, process, product (the fourth P, press, is not considered in this work.) The intent is to identify verified metrics that can be used to quantify creativity with a particular look to whether the metrics are appropriate for creativity, particularly as they pertain to the science and engineering domains. These metrics are examined for applicability to science and engineering, ease of administration and completion, expertise required to score, cost to administer, and time required to administer. Rather than determining the “best” metrics, this examination will provide guidelines for engineering educators and researchers interested in creativity for selecting appropriate metrics to be used in classrooms and research studies based on metric attributes.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1712195
NSF-PAR ID:
10104575
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
ASEE Annual Conference proceedings
ISSN:
1524-4644
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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