skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Work in Progress: Assessing Creativity of Alternative Uses Task Responses: A Detailed Procedure
Creativity is the driver of innovation in engineering. Hence, assessing the effectiveness of a curriculum, a method, or a technique in enhancing the creativity of engineering students is no doubt important. In this paper, the process involved in quantifying creativity when measured through the alternative uses task (AUT) is explained in detail. The AUT is a commonly used test for divergent thinking ability, which is a main aspect of creativity. Although it is commonly used, the processes used to score this task are far from standardized and tend to differ across studies. In this paper, we introduce these problems and move towards a standardized process by providing a detailed account of our quantification process. This quantification process takes into consideration four commonly used dimensions of creativity: originality, flexibility, fluency, and elaboration. AUT data from a preliminary case study were used to illustrate how the AUT and the quantification process can be used. The study was performed to understand the effect of the stereotype threat on the creativity of 25 female engineering students. The results indicate that after the stereotype threat intervention, participants generated more diverse and original ideas.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1561660
PAR ID:
10208472
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, ASME 2020 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference)
    null (Ed.)
    Assessing creativity is not an easy task, but that has not stopped researchers from exploring it. Because creativity is essential to engineering disciplines, knowing how to enhance creative abilities through engineering education has been a topic of interest. In this paper, the event related potential (ERP) technique is used to study the neural responses of engineers via a modified alternative uses task (AUT). Though only a pilot study testing two participants, the preliminary results of this study indicate general neuro-responsiveness to novel or unusual stimuli. These findings also suggest that a scaled-up study along these lines would enable better understanding and modeling of neuroresponses of engineers and creative thinking, as well as contribute to the growing field of ERP research in the field of engineering. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; (, ASME Open Journal of Engineering)
    Abstract Electroencephalogram (EEG) alpha power (8–13 Hz) is a characteristic of various creative task conditions and is involved in creative ideation. Alpha power varies as a function of creativity-related task demands. This study investigated the event-related potentials (ERPs), alpha power activation, and potential machine learning (ML) to classify the neural responses of engineering students involved with creativity task. All participants performed a modified alternate uses task (AUT), in which participants categorized functions (or uses) for everyday objects as either creative, nonsense, or common. At first, this study investigated the fundamental ERPs over central and parietooccipital temporal areas. The bio-responses to understand creativity in engineering students demonstrates that nonsensical and creative stimuli elicit larger N400 amplitudes (−1.107 mV and −0.755 mV, respectively) than common uses (0.0859 mV) on the 300–500 ms window. N400 effect was observed on 300–500 ms window from the grand average waveforms of each electrode of interest. ANOVA analysis identified a significant main effect: decreased alpha power during creative ideation, especially over (O1/2, P7/8) parietooccipital temporal area. Machine learning is used to classify the specific temporal area data’s neural responses (creative, nonsense, and common). A k-nearest neighbors (kNN) classifier was used, and results were evaluated in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1- score using the collected datasets from the participants. With an overall 99.92% accuracy and area under the curve at 0.9995, the kNN classifier successfully classified the participants’ neural responses. These results have great potential for broader adaptation of machine learning techniques in creativity research. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; (, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)
    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
  4. ; (, Creativity Research Journal)
    processes used in designing and relate them to the metrics used in psychology for idea creativity, ie, novelty and fluency. Our goal was to test the reliability of psychometric measures of creativity to assess creativity in team design. We studied 19 teams of 3 professional engineers that engaged in a one hour-long design task. Design tasks have a greater ecological validity than single repetitive tasks like the AUT and the RAT. Engaging in a design task involves a wide range of cognitive activities, which contribute to creative ideation and to expanding the design space. This study focused on the relationship between the teams’ design idea creativity and design behaviors during the task. We explored to what extent design collaboration between teammates, design evaluation and the co-evolution of the problem-solution space relate to the psychometric measures of idea creativity. Results suggest no specific trend in the correlation between collaboration and idea creativity as measured by the metrics used in psychology, while more cognitive focus on problemsolution co-evolution negatively correlates with these measures of idea creativity. The paper concludes with potential explanations for this lack of correlation. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; (, Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition)
    Creative divergent thinking involves the generation of unique ideas by pulling from semantic memory stores and exercising cognitive flexibility to shape these memories into something new. Although cognitive abilities such as episodic memory decline with age, semantic memory tends to remain intact. The current study aims to take advantage of older adults’ strength in semantic memory to investigate the effectiveness of a brief cognitive training to improve creative divergent thinking. Specifically, older adults were trained using a semantic retrieval strategy known as the disassembly strategy in order to improve creativity in the Alternate Uses Task (AUT), which involves generating original uses for objects. We also investigated whether this strategy would transfer to other creativity tasks, specifically, the Divergent Association Task (DAT). Participants were tested on the AUT and DAT across three time points in a single session: before the disassembly strategy was introduced (T0 and T1) and afterwards (T2). Results showed that the disassembly strategy enhances idea novelty in the AUT, though this enhancement did not transfer to DAT performance. Additionally, participants that initially scored lowest on the AUT at T0 showed the greatest increase in AUT performance at T2. This finding provides evidence that older adults can effectively use a semantic retrieval strategy to engage and enhance elements of creative divergent thinking. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email