The study aimed at investigating: the group dynamics underlying ethical decision-making in Senior Design Project (SDP) teams and research labs, and the role of ethics experts in the ethical decision-making.Using cognitive ethnography, we analyzed research activities in engineering research laboratories, and SDP teams' discussions about ethics issues, with or without the presence of ethics experts.We found that student teams demonstrated multi-layered understanding of engineering ethics: explicit and implicit.Those two types of understanding manifested themselves differently across SDP teams.At the explicit level, SDP teams understood their technical responsibility and practical work ethics, but at the same time rarely showed appreciation for social implications or social responsibility in engineering.At the implicit level, SDP teams understanding of engineering ethics varied across teams, and it did not directly influence their ethical decision-making.Some SDP teams, however, did demonstrate implicit and broad understanding of social implications of engineering, particularly when coupled with ethics experts, and when the atmosphere was collegial.When it comes to research laboratories, voluntary ethics discussions were rarely present.Based on our results, we suggest a situated approach, such as midstream modulation in engineering labs and collaboration with ethics experts to improve engineering ethics education programs.
The wave of changes in teaching approaches due to the introduction of the 21 century skills – including creativity and problem solving – has affected not only K through 12 classrooms, but also colleges and universities. Thompson (2014) suggests that when designing courses and curricula college educators should consider not only the content knowledge, skills and dispositions their students need to learn, but also what capacities ought to be developed and through what type of pedagogies. In this article, I propose that pedagogies of engagement are developed and used to teach content and skills in a college level course on Psychology of Creativity. In the main section of the article, I present three groups of creative assignments developed in collaboration with Dr. Heather Snyder: journal activities, creative project assignments, and creative problem-solving workshops. I argue that these assignments not only affect students’ motivation, engagement, and deep learning, but they also facilitate the development of mini-c and little-c creativity.
In this chapter, the authors discuss the roles of motivation, mindset, and passion in creativity. Although Amabile's original theory was that intrinsic motivation increases and extrinsic motivation decreases creativity, current research and her current theory suggest that it is more complex because extrinsic motivation can actually contribute to creative work. There is still limited research applying the mindset literature to creativity, but the evidence so far suggests that the growth mindset is more related to creative achievement, creative problem solving, whether the people think they can be creative, and whether the people think of themselves as being creative people. It turns out that just having intrinsic motivation and the right mindset may not be enough for the deliberate practice over a long period of time needed to master the skill. Extrinsic factors can be helpful when they provide feedback regarding performance and actually reward creative work.
Creativity studies in Poland are deeply rooted in philosophical inquiries. One particularly influential work was authored by Władysław Tatarkiewicz (1976). In his brilliant analysis, the author detailed the historical and cultural development of creativity. Creativity was originally conceived as a divine activity, inaccessible for humans, who at most could aspire to skills, mastery, and craftsmanship. During the age of romanticism, creativity developed into the notion of inspired activity that cannot be understood or accounted for in terms of natural forces and mechanisms. Only in the twentieth century did creativity obtain its more naturalistic meaning as a human activity that results in a new, original work. Interestingly, Tatarkiewicz did not confine his criteria of creativity to sheer novelty, even if matched with other criteria, such as value or social impact. His definition of creativity clearly emphasizes the importance of human effort and energy used for the creation of pieces of art and other artifacts. Mental energy and effort employed in the process of creation appear to be as essential as novelty or originality of the output. In this way, Tatarkiewicz anticipated the modern psychological conceptions of “potential creativity” (Runco & Charles, 1997).
The aim of the present study was to explore the hypothesized relationship between divergent thinking (DT) and two types of evaluation: interpersonal (judgments about others' ideas) and intrapersonal (judgments about one's own ideas). Divergent thinking and evaluation skills were measured by means of a GenEva (Generation and Evaluation) task. There were two conditions of the task: intrapersonal and interpersonal, and two aspects of a given idea were assessed: originality and uniqueness. The main results suggest that (1) overall DT skill is positively related to intrapersonal evaluation of uniqueness; (2) the originality component of DT skill is negatively related to intrapersonal evaluation of uniqueness; (3) overall DT is negatively related to intrapersonal evaluation of originality; (4) underestimation of idea uniqueness is more salient in interpersonal evaluation, particularly in case of those with high DT skill. The results are discussed in terms of author's and observer's perspectives of judgment.
