Creativity in Design Engineers: Attitudes, Opinions and Potentially Influential Factors

Neufeld, Paul; Mirzaei, Omid; Runco, Mark A.; Maw, Sean

doi:10.24908/pceea.v0i0.6519

Cited by 2 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…The methods for data gathering using the 2015 survey are described in detail in [2]. In short, an online pilot survey was distributed to students and faculty from a variety of Colleges, including Engineering, at the University of Saskatchewan during the Fall 2015 term.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These questions help us to examine effects that originate from family backgrounds and personality shaping factors, and to identify other variables explaining attitudes and values about creativity over and above these other factors. The highlights of the results for each of these demographic questions were shared in [2].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Over 2000 responses were gathered, including more than 200 in the College of Engineering. Initial quantitative results from this study were reported at CEEA in 2016 [2]. These results included basic statistics for each quantitative question, as well as selected correlational analyses between some questions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Last year's paper [2] included correlations between the rCAB scores of respondents and some of the other quantitative responses. This paper builds on last year's paper insofar as this paper covers the material from our 2015 creativity survey that was not covered in the first paper.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Creativity in Design Engineers: Attitudes, Opinions and Potentially Influential Factors – Part II

Mirzaei

Neufeld

Knoblauch

et al. 2018

PCEEA

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.Abstract – In the latter half of 2015, a survey looking at attitudes and beliefs about creativity was distributed on the campus of the University of Saskatchewan. Over 2000 responses were gathered, including more than 200 in the College of Engineering. Initial quantitative results from this study were reported in 2016 in Neufeld et al [2]. In terms of the methods used in the study, as discussed in Neufeld et al [2], an online pilot survey was distributed to students and faculty from a variety of the Colleges at the University. Survey questions probed respondents’ affinity for creativity, their personality characteristics, their opinions on state, trait and skill-based viewpoints on creativity, and demographic details. The first part of the survey was a validated Creative Attitudes and Values measurement tool (part of the Runco Creativity Assessment Battery (rCAB)© 2012), as discussed in Acar and Runco [1]. This tool consists of 25, 5-point Likert scale items. Of these 25 items, 15 and 10 were indicative and contraindicative items, respectively. Contraindicative items were reverse coded so that they could be used along with the indicative ones. Both past research and our results showed good inter-item reliability scores for this measurement tool. In Neufeld et al [2] we presented results covering all of the closed-form, quantitative questions along with some correlational calculations with the rCAB scores. The focus of the current paper is on the qualitative results, as well as on a factor analysis of the rCAB questions. The factor analysis was quite successful. We used SPSS and forced a correlation of items, reducing to three factors. We have just over 29% of variance accounted for, with 10% non-redundant residuals. We have strong anti-correlation between one factor and the other two, and no correlation between the other two. These results will be compared to those of the rCAB authors [3]. As for the qualitative data, we asked several open-ended questions to probe how respondents defined creativity, whether they regarded it as a positive behavior, as well as how they felt about creativity in terms of it being a skill, trait and/or state. For example, pairs of questions asked when creativity is difficult and easy, when it should and should not be used, and when it grows and diminishes. For each of the 9 questions that had open-ended answers, concepts were extracted from individual responses. Concepts were then grouped into themes. Themes and concepts were compared across questions and were aligned. Responses were then coded for concepts and themes. At this point, the text data could be quantitatively examined. This paper presents those results, and discusses the implications of the concepts, themes, and their statistics for how we talk about creativity, and how we can teach it. Comparisons will be made between the results from engineering students and staff versus non-engineers. This paper completes the first level of evaluation of the results of this initial survey focused on attitudes and beliefs about creativity. Future work will focus on examining correlations between the results of different questions, including the rCAB scores.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Creativity in Design Engineers: Attitudes, Opinions and Potentially Influential Factors – Part II

Mirzaei

Neufeld

Knoblauch

et al. 2018

PCEEA

Self Cite

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show abstract

“…Creativity is also important to engineers: Neufeld et al [14] found that engineers and engineering students value creativity, that creativity is generally a positive behavior, and 92% of respondents from the College of Engineering felt they were creative at least some of the time.…”

Section: Creativity In Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Componential Theories of Creativity: A Case Study of Teaching Creative Problem Solving

Rennick¹,

McKay²

2018

PCEEA

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Engineering is the discipline of applying scientific and mathematical tools to solve practical problems for society. At the core of a person’s problem-solving abilities is their creativity. This is a preliminary and exploratory theory-based paper summarizing the two most prevalent componential theories of creativity as applied to a case study. These theories outline a set of processes which contribute to a person’s ability to be creative in a domain. The components differ slightly between models, but include: motivation; domain-specific knowledge, skills, and abilities; and cognitive process of creativity including problem finding, ideation, and evaluation.To demonstrate the practical application of these theories to engineering pedagogy, they will be applied to a case study of a 2-day academic hackathon called “Tron Days”. Tron Days guides students through a multi-step modelling and verification process and concludes with teams of students designing and constructing a robotic arm. At the end of the second day, students demonstrated their functioning robotic prototypes. This event has now been run twice for first semester Mechatronics Engineering students, and similar implementations with different problems have been run in seven other engineering programs at the same institution. Each section of this paper will demonstrate the application of componential theories of creativity by drawing connections to the Tron Days event.

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Creativity in Design Engineers: Attitudes, Opinions and Potentially Influential Factors

Cited by 2 publications

References 14 publications

Creativity in Design Engineers: Attitudes, Opinions and Potentially Influential Factors – Part II

Creativity in Design Engineers: Attitudes, Opinions and Potentially Influential Factors – Part II

Componential Theories of Creativity: A Case Study of Teaching Creative Problem Solving

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