| NSF Org: |
CMMI Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | September 4, 2015 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | September 4, 2015 |
| Award Number: | 1538077 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Kathryn Jablokow
CMMI Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation ENG Directorate for Engineering |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2015 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2019 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $299,820.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $299,820.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
2100 S MOBBERLY AVE LONGVIEW TX US 75602-3564 (903)233-3100 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
PO Box 7001 Longview TX US 75607-7001 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | ESD-Eng & Systems Design |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.041 |
ABSTRACT
Engineers regularly face problems and must draw from past experiences to solve them. The more experiences a person has, the more ideas they are able to develop. Further, engineers with different experiences may develop different types of ideas. This award will develop a way to measure the experiences of a designer in order to predict his or her ability to generate creative solutions to a problem. This new understanding of the creative process will enable teachers to understand how engineers gain experience and use that experience to generate high-quality ideas, improving the ability of educators in the United States to teach creativity and innovation in the classroom. This award will also provide a way for individuals to understand their own strengths in creative thinking and ways in which they can become more innovative. Finally, this award will enable project managers to strategically create diverse teams of problem-solvers to maximize the types and quality of ideas developed in a team's problem-solving process.
This research will measure an aspect of individual creativity, spontaneous flexibility, from a psychology perspective and an engineering design perspective. The psychology perspective focuses on an individual's experience and problem-finding ability, while the engineering design perspective focuses on the individual's problem-solving ability. Statistical correlations between these two perspectives will provide insights into the value of an individual's problem-finding abilities when faced with problem-solving tasks. It is hypothesized that when individuals perform these problem-finding or problem-solving tasks, they draw from the same cognitive network of relationships between artifact functions and forms. A cognitive model will be developed to bridge the gap between psychologists' view of spontaneous flexibility and applications in engineering design and to isolate the role spontaneous flexibility serves to enhance problem-solving tasks often encountered in engineering design. Spontaneous flexibility will be measured multiple times from both the psychology and design perspectives, providing repeated measures of the individual's spontaneous flexibility. This experiment design and the rigorous data analysis techniques will enable a large portion of the statistical variability to be accounted for, providing new insights and applications of the role spontaneous flexibility serves in engineering design. Statistical analyses of a longitudinal study of engineering students and demographic information will provide an understanding of how students grow in their creativity during their engineering degree and how students' background and experiences are related to their spontaneous flexibility.
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
An important part of engineering is designing objects and processes to solve problems and meet people’s needs. Since every design situation is unique, engineers use creativity as they solve problems. The amount of creativity an engineer uses will vary due to the engineer’s style and the problem they are working on. In this research, we were interested in studying engineers’ creativity as they solve problems.
Psychologists have also studied creativity and have broken creativity into different concepts. One concept in particular is called spontaneous flexibility, which is a person’s ability to respond to a situation in many different ways. When engineers face a problem, it is important that they think about many ways to solve the problem instead of using the first idea that comes to mind. With many ideas to choose from, they are more likely to find a better or more innovative solution.
Psychologists have studied spontaneous flexibility by asking people how an object, such as a paperclip, can be used for purposes besides its typical use. They then measure spontaneous flexibility from the ideas the people generated. We call this "problem-finding" since the person is looking for problems that the object can solve. However, engineers are often less interested in problem-finding and more interested in "problem-solving" since the engineer is designing something to solve a problem or meet a need. Therefore, we want to know if spontaneous flexibility is important for engineers when solving problems and how they are learning it in college.
To study this, we developed a problem-solving test as close as possible to the problem-finding test to see if engineering students perform the same way on both tests and to see if they change from year to year. We asked them to perform three problem-finding and three problem-solving tasks each year for three years and used their ideas to measure their creativity. In research, creativity is measured many ways and typically depends on the number of ideas and how different, unusual, good, and/or detailed the ideas are. There are many different opinions of how creativity should be measured, so a lot of our time was spent understanding the different views, measuring creativity each way, and comparing the results. We presented these results at conferences so other researchers can learn from this research and determine appropriate ways to measure creativity for their own research.
With our three-year study, we learned that student creativity increases throughout college on the problem-finding ideation tasks. In particular, the number of ideas increased each year. We believe this increase also caused an increase in the variety of the ideas and number of novel ideas they generated, but it did not increase their efficiency. We also found that performance in problem-solving is highly correlated to performance in problem-finding, telling us that students performed similarly on both types of tasks. This shows us that there is a lot of overlap in each creative thinking process. However, on the problem-solving tasks, we found that students did not improve throughout college on any of the creativity measures, leading us to believe that there is an aspect of problem-solving that is different from problem-finding.
We also wanted to know if a student’s experience, gender, or major had an influence on their creative performance, so we compared performance on each creativity measure considering these differences. We did not find any important differences in performance, so we believe that good, new, unusual, or innovative ideas are equally likely to come from anyone.
We feel this research is important because it connects psychology research to engineering research in an orderly way. We now know more about the connection between these two fields, especially in the area of spontaneous flexibility and idea generation. This research also produced a detailed and valuable dataset with hundreds of participants and thousands of ideas that are classified and scored in detail. We hope to use this dataset in the future and provide it to other researchers so we can continue studying engineering creativity in depth. We also feel this work could change the way we teach engineering in the future. We want to figure out why students are increasing in creativity in problem-finding and adjust the curriculum so students also grow in problem-solving creativity. The dataset can also provide a point of reference for testing new ideation procedures. We could ask new students to generate ideas but give them guidance, tips, or other interventions. With our data, we will be able to determine if those interventions increased their creativity.
Last Modified: 11/08/2019
Modified by: Benjamin W Caldwell
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