ENHANCING CREATIVITY IN ENGINEERING AND ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY STUDENTS

DOI: 10.14684/intertech.13.2014.61-65 While engineering projects demand creative and innovative approaches to produce new and useful ideas and projects, the traditional engineering curriculum has fallen short in significantly enhancing the creative capabilities of engineering students as they progress through undergraduate programs. To help address this creativity gap the Research Initiation Grant in Engineering Education (RIGEE) project has established an interdisciplinary research collaboration between engineering/engineering technology faculty and creativity and cognitive science experts to identify, develop, and test methods for integrating creativity into undergraduate engineering and engineering technology courses and enhancing the creative capacities of engineering and engineering technology students. This research project assesses eleven aspects of creative thinking as measured by the Reisman Diagnostic Creativity Assessment (RDCA), including originality, divergent thinking, and risk taking. During the 2012-2013 academic year, the RDCA was administered in several undergraduate engineering courses, some of which were taught by engineering professors who had undergone creativity training, and these courses have been labeled as "creativity" classes in the RIGEE protocol. Those courses taught by engineering professors with no formal creativity training have been labeled as "non-creativity" classes. Comparing the eleven domains of the RDCA between "creativity" and "non-creativity" classes will allow for an assessment of the efficacy of creativity training for engineering and engineering technology professors.