This is a typescript version of the paper published in International Journal of Technological Design Education, 2010, 20, 345-358.]

Recognizing and fostering creativity in technological designeducation

David Cropley and Arthur Cropley

University of South Australia University of Hamburg

Author’s addressProf Arthur Cropley

Unit 3, 120 South TerraceAdelaide, SA 5000

Australiaemail: arthur.cropley@alumni.adelaide.edu.au

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Running head: Fostering creativity

Recognizing and fostering creativity in technological designeducation

Abstract

The importance of creativity in technological design education

is now clearly recognized, both in everyday understanding and

also in formal curriculum guidelines. Design offers special

opportunities for creativity because of the “openness” of

problems (ill-defined problems, a variety of pathways to the

solution, no pre-specified “correct” solutions). However,

teachers are still confronted by the question of how to

specify which designs are creative and why, how to identify

where the creative strengths of designs lie so that students

can build on these, and what advice to give on how to change

designs to make them more creative. There are also still open

questions concerning design pedagogy. A “functional” model of

creativity offers guidelines for making plain to students what

they are expected to achieve with their designs and for

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diagnosing the creativity of the designs they offer. These

yield, in turn, guidelines for design pedagogy.

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Recognizing and fostering creativity in technological design

education

Modern curriculum guidelines (e.g., International

Technology Education Association, 2000) give great emphasis to

the role of design in technology education. Indeed, as Mawson

(2003) pointed out, the design process is now well-established

as a key element of such education. However, Mawson went on to

argue that, despite this, current paradigms for teaching

design are flawed, and an alternative pedagogy is needed.

Kimbell (2001) focused on the related question of assessment:

how to accredit the designing and making of artefacts by

technology education students. The purpose of this paper is to

make a contribution to understanding these two issues in

technological design education: pedagogy and assessment.

In a comprehensive review, Lewis (2005) turned to

psychological research on creativity for ideas on what is

needed. According to him, technology education nowadays (as

well as art education, physical education, and music

education, among others) needs to promote more than simply

knowledge of materials, mastery of special technical skills

and techniques, or correct use of tools or instruments. It

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needs to go beyond these to pursue “more subjective and

elusive goals (p. 35).” Among these he includes “creative

insight (p. 35).” According to Lewis, within technology

education the teaching of design is “ … almost ideally suited

to uncovering dimensions of the creative potential of children

that would remain hidden in much of the rest of the curriculum

(p. 43).” The special property of design is what Lewis called

its “open-endedness (p. 43)”: Design problems are ill-

structured, solutions are not defined in advance, and the

pathway to the solution is open. According to Cropley (2005),

these are precisely the conditions that promote creativity, so

that there does indeed seem to be an inherent link between

design education and creativity. In this paper we will focus

on two issues: What constitutes a creative product from the

point of view of technological design and how the generation

of such products can be promoted in the classroom.

Technological design and creativity

In educational discussions, creativity is typically studied

from the point of view of the four Ps: person, process, product and

press (Barron, 1969, Rhodes, 1961). In this article, however, we

focus on only one of the Ps—product. The issue at stake is not that of

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the processes involved in creativity (for instance divergent and

convergent thinking), nor the personal properties students need in

order to be creative (such as personality or motivation), but of how

teachers can recognize creativity in products when they see it. We

also focus on products that are not only novel but also have some

practical function. Such products go beyond mere novelty: usually

they must satisfy task specifications, often externally imposed

(i.e., the products must be “relevant”), and must be capable of

fulfilling some practical purpose (they must be “effective”). A

simple example would be a bridge built to get traffic across a river.

A creative design for the bridge would not only need to display novel

features but would also need to satisfy specifications such as being

built from specified materials and within cost limits (relevance)

and being capable of carrying the required volume of traffic without

falling down (effectiveness). Cropley and Cropley (2005, p. 169)

referred to generation of such novelty as involving “functional”

creativity. The polar opposite of the functional approach is to be

found in the writings of the French novelist Theophile Gautier, who

in the foreword to his own novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1998 [1836])

argued that creativity is of necessity useless. Without wishing to

denigrate approaches to creativity which give greater emphasis to,

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for instance, sheer novelty of product or technique, or the

generation of beauty regardless of practical applications, we focus

in this article on creativity with a practical purpose.

It must be admitted that emphasis on successfully

achieving a practical purpose injects the issue of values into

the discussion: for instance, whose purpose is to be achieved

and what constitutes success? Relatively early in the modern

era Amabile (1982) emphasised that observers apply their own

subjective criteria when assessing creativity. This issue was

also raised in early discussions by Csikszentmihalyi (e.g.,

1988) and further elaborated later (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi,

1999). He argued that “creativity” is essentially something

that exists in the eye of the beholder. It involves a value

judgement made by people who are knowledgeable in a field.

Furthermore there may be disagreement among such people; one

person’s creativity may be another’s banality. This means that

the perceived creativity of technological designs produced by

students may depend on the particular observer (probably a

teacher), while even when design teachers agree, their views

may differ from those of judges from a different design

culture such as teachers of traditional academic subjects,

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educational theorists, or members of the public. However,

Cropley and Cropley (2008) raised the promise of a “universal

aesthetic” of creativity which would transcend design

cultures.

The extent to which functional creativity as defined above is

the same as creativity in a purely aesthetic sense, or is linked to

creative production in fine arts, literature, music, or similar

domains is not clear. However, linking creativity with production of

practically useful novel products (while bearing in mind the value

issues just outlined)—especially technological/engineering

products—is by no means far-fetched. Indeed, the crucial event that

started the modern creativity era was the successful launching in

1957 of Sputnik I, when the western world’s engineers were

judged to have been beaten in the first event in the space

race by the engineers of the Soviet Union as a result of their

inadequate levels of creativity. This means that the jumping

off point for the modern creativity era was interest in

functional creativity—generation of novelty that is useful for

practical purposes—and involved technological design.

Furthermore, in the ensuing search for the source of weakness

that had led to the western world’s deficiencies in functional

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creativity, the problem was quickly attributed to defects in

education. Thus, the major issue when the modern creativity

era began about 50 years ago was not questions of

artistic/aesthetic creativity or the pursuit of truth and

beauty, but fostering via technology education the generation

of novel products capable of contributing to the welfare and

safety of society.

Despite this, with the passage of time theoretical

discussions of what creativity is good for came to be

dominated by humanistic writers (e.g., Maslow, 1973; May,

1976; Rogers, 1961), who saw its value as lying in its

beneficial effects on personal growth, self-fulfilment, and

similar aspects of individual well-being. The result was that

the purpose of fostering creativity in the classroom came to

be seen as promoting the personal development of individual

children. Usefulness of products came to be under-emphasized,

with the emphasis being placed on cognitive processes

favourable for creativity (such as divergent thinking), and

personal properties that encouraged people to be creative

(such as daring or unconventionality). Products were only

interesting to the extent that they gave evidence of

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appropriate processes and creativity-facilitating personal

properties. All that was required was that they should be

surprising—Lewis cited Bruner’s definition of creativity as

involving “effective surprise” (Bruner, 1962, p. 37)—with

practical usefulness often ignored.

In fact, there is well-documented interest—going back to

the ancient world—in creativity as a socially-useful

phenomenon. The Chinese Emperor, Han Wudi, who reigned until

87BCE, was intensely interested in finding innovative thinkers

and giving them high rank in the civil service, and reformed

the method of selection of mandarins to achieve this. Both

Francis Bacon (1909 [1604]) and René Descartes (1991 [1644]),

two of the founders of modern science, saw scientific

creativity as involving the harnessing of the forces of nature

for the betterment of the human condition. Interestingly, and not

insignificantly, this statement is very close to modern

definitions of the discipline of engineering. For example, the

US Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)

defines engineering as:

“… the profession in which a knowledge of the

mathematical and natural

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sciences gained by study, experience, and practice

is applied with judgement

to develop ways to utilize economically, the

materials and forces of nature for

the benefit of mankind.”

Teachers’ attitudes to creativity

For at least the last 30-40 years teachers have been expressing

positive views about creativity and the need to foster it in the

classroom (e.g., Feldhusen & Treffinger, 1975). Despite this,

however, research over several decades in a number of different

countries, e.g., Australia (Howieson, 1984), Germany (Brandau, et

al., 2007), Nigeria (Obuche, 1986), Poland (Karwowski, 2007),

Singapore (Tan, 2003), Turkey (Oral & Guncer, 1993), the United

Kingdom (e.g., Brady, 1970), and the USA (Dawson, D’Andrea,

Affinito, & Westby, 1999; Scott, 1999), has consistently reported

that in practice teachers are indifferent or even antagonistic to

creative children.

The problem is by no means confined to school-level education.

Cropley and Cropley (2005) reviewed findings on fostering

creativity in engineering education in universities in the

United States of America, and concluded that there is little

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support for creative students. It is true that there has been

some effort in recent years to encourage creativity in

colleges and universities: For instance, in 1990 the National

Science Foundation (NSF) established the Engineering Coalition

of Schools for Excellence and Leadership (ECSEL). This has the

goal of transforming undergraduate engineering education.

However, a review of current practice throughout higher

education in the United States conducted 10 years later

(Fasko, 2000-2001) pointed out that the available information

indicates that deliberate training in creativity is rare.

The problem is also not confined to the United States of

America. Although the European Union has established programs

bearing the names of famous innovators such as SOCRATES or

LEONARDO, it is astonishing that in the guidelines for the

development of education in the Community concepts like

“innovation” or “creativity” simply do not exist. To take a

second example, at least until recently the Max Planck

Institute for Human Development, Germany’s leading research

institute for the development of talent in research in the

social sciences, had never supported a project on the topics

of creativity or innovation. In a personal letter dated April

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26, 2006, the office of the President of the Max Planck

Society confirmed that the organization does not see

creativity as a significant area of research.

In his review, Lewis (2005) summarized the situation in what we

regard as moderate terms: “ … there are indications in the literature

that we still have some way to go before creativity becomes a more

central feature of the teaching of design in the United States and

elsewhere (p. 44).” In view of the consistent reports of positive

teacher lip-service to creativity but negative attitudes to

students who display it, Cropley and Cropley (2009) adopted the

optimistic position that the problem is more a matter of lack of

information than of malice. Lewis (2005, p. 46) drew up a list of the

information that is required, and included as the very first areas

requiring more knowledge:

(a) implications for design/problem solving pedagogy and

(b) implications for assessment.

The purpose of the present paper is to offer practical guidelines for

design education in both these areas. How can teachers of design

recognize functional creativity (practically useful creativity) in

students’ work, and what can they do in their teaching practice to

encourage more of it.

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Assessing the creativity of solutions to technological design

problems

Although it may seem strange to commence with assessment

rather than teaching and learning practice, our approach to

pedagogy derives from what it is that students ought to be

producing, so that we start with products and work backwards

to methods for encouraging generation of such products. It is

obvious that a creative product involves bringing something

new into existence. Without variation from what already exists

there would be no creative products. For some writers (see

Gautier above), departure from the usual is sufficient.

However, in the context of functional creativity novelty,

although absolutely essential, is not sufficient on its own.

Not every departure from what already exists is functionally

creative. Cattell and Butcher (1968, p. 271) popularised the

term “pseudo-creativity” to refer to variability whose novelty

derives only from non-conformity, lack of discipline, blind

rejection of what already exists and simply letting oneself

go. To this can be added “quasi-creativity” (Cropley, 1997, p.

89, translating Heinelt, 1974), which has many of the elements

of genuine creativity—such as a high level of fantasy—but only

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a tenuous connection with reality. An example would be the

novelty generated in daydreams.

The products which result from pseudo- and quasi-

creativity may possess a raw potential for creativity, but at

least one further property is vital for them to be functional.

Amabile and Tighe (1993, p. 9) emphasized that products must

be “appropriate,” “correct,” “useful,” or “valuable.” We refer

to such properties as involving “relevance and effectiveness”.

Terms such as “correct” or “useful” clearly involve value

judgements, as was discussed above. From the point of view of

teachers of technological design, however, relevance and

effectiveness is a necessary property. It would not be

unreasonable for a teacher to ask a student who had been given

the problem of designing, let us say, a desk that would be

comfortable for both very tall and very short students, but

instead folded the sketching paper into a paper aeroplane and

threw it across the room, to show how this solution helped

solve the design problem at hand, i.e., to question where its

relevance and effectiveness lay.

Relevance and effectiveness is indispensable for solving

a problem, and indeed problems can be solved through relevance

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and effectiveness alone, although such solutions are not

creative but merely routine. Nonetheless, a routine solution

is still a solution, and may prove to be very useful. The

addition of novelty leads to an “original” solution—a relevant

and effective solution that does the job in a new way. These

two criteria of a solution (relevance and effectiveness;

novelty) are joint pre-requisites for functional creativity:

Both must be present for a solution to reach the lowest level

of creativity, which we refer to as “originality” (e.g.,

Cropley & Cropley, 2005, 2009).

However, a creative solution to a design problem can go

further by being “elegant.” At its simplest this means that

good design solutions look good. Grudin (1990) referred to

“the grace of great things.” Such grace, or elegance as we

call it, is often readily recognisable: as Maier and Rechtin

(2000) put it, citing Wernher von Braun, “The eye is a good

architect. Believe it!” Elegance adds value to a relevant and

effective solution that is already original, and this

increases its creativity. In the real world, elegance may mean

that a solution to a design problem is recognized for what it

is, is accepted, applauded and adopted, while it may also mean

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that a particular solution defeats a rival solution, for

instance in the market-place.

Finally, comes what we now call “genesis”: the property

of a relevant and effective, novel and elegant solution that

makes it transferable to different (quite possibly

unanticipated) situations, opens up new ways of looking at

known problems, or draws attention to the existence of

previously unnoticed problems. In this way, a generic solution

goes beyond a “merely” elegant one and yields the highest

level of functional creativity—innovation. A simple example of

a solution that involved a new way of looking at a known

problem can be seen in the work of a group of civil engineers

who were confronted with the necessity of drilling a large

number of holes in extremely hard concrete slabs so that the

slabs could be bolted together. The drill bits kept on

snapping and the problem was initially looked at as that of

designing tougher and sharper bits. It was only when the task

was redefined as involving avoiding the need for holes

altogether that a solution was found: the concrete slabs were

redesigned in such a way that they slotted together without

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bolts. This opened up a new approach to construction with

concrete slabs.

The various levels of creativity are depicted in Table 1.

--------------------------------- Insert Table 1 about here ---------------------------------

We take the view that the progression from routine, to

original, then elegant and finally innovative solutions

represent not only an increase in amount of creativity

(quantitative difference in creativity), but also a change in

kind of creativity (qualitative difference). A generic

solution is thus not only more creative than a routine one,

but is also a different kind of solution: It affects the field

into which it is introduced not just to a greater extent than

a routine one, but also in a different way, for instance by

changing the prevailing paradigm. An example would be the

design of the Sydney Opera House which changed the way civil

engineers thought about constructing large buildings (for

instance, it introduced the idea of building the roof first).

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This approach to recognising functional creativity can be

applied to technological design education in the area of

assessment, i.e., the second area in which Lewis (2005) called

for more information about creativity and how to foster it in

the classroom. A creative design product can be assessed

according to the criteria of relevance and effectiveness,

novelty, elegance, and genesis. What is needed for doing this,

however, are guidelines for teachers that enable them to

recognize these criteria when they see them in students’ work.

Hints about what to look for are provided by a number of

writers: Savransky (2000) argued that creative solutions in

engineering involve one or more of six principles:

Improvement, diagnostics, trimming, analogy, synthesis, and

genesis. Sternberg, Kaufman, and Pretz (2002) constructed a

similar list including conceptual replication, redefinition,

forward incrementation, advance forward incrementation,

redirection, reconstruction and redirection, and re-

initiation. In Table 2 we have mapped such “indicators,”

largely based on the work of the authors just mentioned, onto

the four “criteria”.

--------------------------------------

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Insert Table 2 about here

-------------------------------------

The indicators listed in Table 2, such as redefinition,

generation or pleasingness call upon teachers to make

subjective judgements. However, Hennessey (1994) reported

inter-rater agreement ranging up to .93 even among untrained

undergraduates who rated the creativity of geometric designs

or Picasso drawings, while internal reliabilities of

individual students’ ratings of creativity ranged from .73

to .93. Vosburg (1998) also reported that untrained university

students who rated products on 7-point scales such as “very

complex–not at all complex” or “very understandable–not at all

understandable” achieved inter-rater reliabilities of

about .90, despite the subjectivity of such properties.

Turning directly to the indicators in Table 2, Cropley

and Cropley (2009) reported that a small group of 13 teachers

(9 women and 4 men) aged from the early 20s to the early 50s,

who used these indicators to assess the creativity of models

of wheeled vehicles designed and built by students (see below)

had no problems understanding and applying the indicators,

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agreed among themselves (inter-rater agreement), and achieved

a reasonable test-retest reliability of 0.79 (Cropley &

Cropley, 2009). It is true that the raters in both the studies

cited in the previous paragraph as well as in the Cropley and

Cropley pilot study had a similar socio-cultural background,

so that the high level of agreement might be to some extent an

artefact of their homogeneous design culture. However, design

teachers using the indicators in Table 2 would also be

expected to share at least a broadly similar design culture,

so that it is not unreasonable to hope for substantial

agreement among them too

In a more substantial study of the usefulness of the

criteria and indicators in Table 2, Haller, Courvoisier, and

Cropley (2009) used them to rate designs for a novel hands-

free mobile phone holder made by 55 visual art students at two

schools in Switzerland. These designs were rated by a total of

10 experts (design teachers at the schools in question), 7

males and 3 females with an age range of 35-59 and from 3-39

years of teaching experience. The designs were also rated by 5

novices (people with no expertise in design), 2 men and 3

women ranging in age from 24-33. The median reliability

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(Cronbach’s α) of the overall scores assigned by the 15 judges

was 0.85. Coefficients for the reliability of the total scores

for the novice raters ranged from 0.74-0.92, while for the

experts they ranged, with one exception, from 0.75 to 0.96

(one expert’s ratings were noticeably less reliable than those

of all others), i.e., the range of reliabilities was almost

identical for experts and novices. These findings suggest that

long and highly focused experience in the area of design

(i.e., extensive exposure to a common design culture) is not

necessary for reliable ratings.

An idea of the validity of the scale can be obtained from

the fact that inter-rater agreement on the overall creativity

of each of the 55 designs ranged from 0.64-0.89. (An inter-

rater reliability of 1.00 would indicate perfect agreement

among all 15 raters.) Thus, the judges tended to have a shared

understanding of what is meant by the criteria and indicators.

Haller, Courvoisier and Cropley (2009) also calculated the

level of agreement between a subjective global rating of the

overall creativity of each of the 55 designs made by each

judge (without reference to the criteria and indicators in

Table 2) and the total scores they subsequently assigned the

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designs using these indicators. The level of agreement ranged

from 0.66-0.89. Thus, the total score yielded by the

indicators agreed substantially with raters’ intuitive global

assessments of creativity.

A pedagogy for creative design

Can creativity be taught?

The first issue that must be dealt with is that of

whether it is possible to train creativity at all. In a

comprehensive recent study, Scott, Leritz, and Mumford (2004)

identified 70 studies published in or after 1980 in which the

extent to which creativity training enabled people to behave

more creatively was tested empirically. The studies had to

meet strict methodological criteria: There had to be a

specific focus on creativity training, the procedure employed

in the training had to be clearly described, the measures used

to assess the effectiveness of the training had to be

identified and described, and statistical data on

effectiveness had to be provided. There also had to be some

kind of control condition, either a control group or a test–

retest design. Participants in the studies were both males and

females, were aged both under and over 14, were tested in both

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occupational and school settings, and were both gifted and of

average ability. Creativity-training procedures included

cognitive, social, personality, motivational, and combined

procedures (for an overview of a number of these see Cropley &

Cropley 2009, pp. 216-223), and creativity was assessed using

cognitive tests such as divergent thinking tests, motivational

and attitude scales, and ratings by judges (for an overview of

such assessment procedures see Cropley & Cropley, 2009,

pp.184-197).

Scott and his colleagues subjected these 70 studies to a

meta-analysis. Meta-analyses combine the information contained

in a number of smaller-scale studies in order to detect

relationships (in this case changes in creativity resulting

from training) that might go unnoticed in smaller individual

studies because of the low power of statistical tests with

small samples Meta-analysis can be used to examine the way a

treatment (such as provision of creativity training) affects a

dependent variable (such as subsequent creative performance)

even when the variables are measured using different

instruments with a wide variety of participants. As is common

in meta-analytic studies, Scott, Leritz, and Mumford (2004)

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tested the extent to which creativity training influenced

creative behaviour by calculating effect strength.

Huang (2005) too conducted a methodologically rigorous

meta-analysis of 62 empirical studies of the way creativity

training influenced the behaviour of schoolchildren,

university students and adults. His data were obtained with

participants ranging from preschoolers (under 6 years old), to

school age children (6-18 years in age), college students aged

19-22, and employed adults (mainly teachers and nurses)

ranging in age from 25-60. The data also included American

Indian participants in the second and sixth grades, hearing-

impaired youngsters aged 8 and 10, and five- and six-year-olds

from a socially disadvantaged background. In terms of ability,

participants ranged from learning disabled to gifted. The

procedures for training creativity included Creative Problem

Solving (CPS), other formal training programs (such as the

Purdue Creative Thinking Program or the Khatena Training

Method), workshops, school programs, and special creativity

techniques. Creativity was assessed using judges’ ratings,

attitude questionnaires (i.e., self-ratings), and various

widely-used creativity tests, especially the Torrance Tests of

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Creative Thinking. Huang also subjected his findings to a

meta-analysis, and concluded that there was a 95% probability

that the effect strength of creativity training lay

between .62 and .71. This indicates a strong relationship

between training and changes in creative behaviour (Cohen,

1988).

Both Scott, Leritz and Mumford (2004) and Huang (2005)

concluded that training in divergent thinking and

encouragement of motivation known to facilitate creativity—

such as dissatisfaction with the status quo or willingness to

take risks— fostered creativity. This was most pronounced when

the criterion of creativity involved cognitive processes

(i.e., there were substantial improvements in people’s

divergent thinking and problem solving after training). Within

the cognitive domain, the single largest benefit of creativity

training was greater originality of thinking, although

training also enhanced fluency, flexibility, and elaboration

of thought. The second strongest effect of training was on

creative performance (i.e., the products people produced after

training were more creative). There were also noteworthy

changes in attitudes. The effectiveness of creativity training

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was strong in both children and adults and in both educational

and non-educational settings (e.g., at work), and in both

gifted and non-gifted people. This was true for both males and

females, although more marked in males, especially with regard

to divergent thinking.

Thus, although there are dissenting voices such as Baer

(1998) and Dow and Mayer (2004), there are grounds for

optimism. Of great interest, however, is that Scott Leritz and

Mumford (2004) found differences between training procedures

in their effectiveness. When cognitive, social, personality,

motivational, and combined training procedures were compared,

it was found that the cognitive approach produced the largest

changes. Scott, Leritz and Mumford (2004) then divided

cognitive training procedures according to the particular

process that each procedure emphasized, and found that

training in problem identification, idea generation, and

conceptual combination was most effective.

Scott, Leritz and Mumford (2004) also found that the best

way to foster these processes was to give participants

opportunities to analyse novel, ill-defined problems, whereas

mere wild deviation from the usual (pseudo-creativity), or

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unfettered expression of unexplored ideas (quasi-creativity)

was actually negatively related to the effectiveness of

training. It was also found that highly organized and

systematic training based on realistic examples and involving

substantial periods of structured, focused practice (i.e.,

relevant to a real field or domain) was most effective, not

short bursts of unstructured work on an ad hoc collection of

activities that might or might not be connected with the

setting in which people were supposed to become more creative.

Finally, training that started by introducing relevant general

concepts and basic principles then moved to targeted practice

aimed at acquiring specific skills achieved more than holistic

training.

These findings suggest that reality-oriented creativity

involving knowledge and skill, i.e., functional creativity,

can be trained. From the findings of Scott, Leritz and Mumford

(2004) we have worked out five principles for successfully

doing this. These are:

● Give students targeted practice in solving (design) problems (not for instance

simply generating “blind” novelty).

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● Give students highly organized and systematic training based on realistic

examples from the field they are learning about.

● Base the creativity training just mentioned on extended periods of structured, focused

practice (not for instance an occasional “creativity” session).

● Base training on broad knowledge and skills (relevant generalconcepts and basic

principles).

● Move from broad knowledge and skills to targeted practice

aimed at acquiring specific knowledge and skills.

Creativity-oriented pedagogy: A case study

Imparting broad knowledge

The principles just stated give strong support to the idea

that design pedagogy has high potential for fostering

creativity. The open-endedness of design problems stressed by

Lewis (2005) and their link to real-life professional/artistic

activities in technology, art, music, and the like satisfy two

of the main requirements just outlined. The material presented

in Tables 1 and 2 provides more concrete insights into what

should be taught and how, i.e., a creativity-oriented pedagogy.

29

Cropley and Cropley (2009) presented a case-study of a

class that set out to put some of the ideas spelled out above

into practice. This involved a second year engineering class on

engineering innovation in an Australian university. A total of

61 men aged from 18 to 25 years completed the project. These

people received theoretical lectures on creativity (see below)

and designed, built and demonstrated a model of a wheeled

vehicle propelled by the energy stored in a mousetrap and

capable of covering at least 1m. Lectures involved two kinds of

content: content focused on learning about creativity and

content that involved actual creative activity. The theoretical

material aimed at encouraging:

1. creative thinking skills;

2. positive attitudes to creativity and creative

performance;

3. motivation to be creative;

4. perception of oneself as capable of being creative;

5. positive mood in problem-solving situations;

6. recognising and placing a high value on the creativity

of other students,

as well as one’s own; and

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7. reduction of anxiety about creativity.

The aim was to provide students with a practical, down-to-

earth concept of creativity, and thus reduce their scepticism

or other concerns about this topic. The main topics dealt with

were:

1. What has creativity got to do with engineers?

2. Why do engineers have problems with creativity?

3. What are the psychological elements of creativity?

4. What are the characteristics of a creative product?

5. How can you solve problems creatively?

6. What blocks creativity in technology?

This material was intended to provide students with an

understandable, practical approach to creativity that stressed

cognitive (how do you get ideas?), motivational (why should

you be creative?), affective (what effect do feelings,

attitudes, and the like have on creativity?), and social (how

do other people affect your creativity?) aspects. The actual

content was largely presented via case studies (e.g., insulin

pens, Kevlar, disposable contact lenses, Gore-Tex fabric,

Xerox, the GE, Rolls Royce and P&W aero-engine maintenance

concept, and the development of EBay). Presentation and

31

analysis of the case studies emphasized the four components

just listed: cognition, motivation, affect and social factors.

Making a creative design

The second element of the class was the actual design and

construction of a novel but effective (functionally creative)

working model of a “wheeled vehicle powered by the energy

stored in a mousetrap and capable of moving at least 1m.” (It

should be borne in mind that this problem was set for

engineering students, so that there was an emphasis on an

engineering-oriented product. Design is, of course, not

synonymous with engineering, and other disciplines would focus

on problems relevant to the discipline in question.) In the

first 8 weeks of the semester, in a 2-hour laboratory session

that accompanied the theory classes each week, students worked

in groups of three on designing and building their models

(except for two groups which were reduced to two members by

dropouts). Later, the models were presented to other students

during the lab period, and publicly analysed by the instructor

in terms of the criteria in Table 2. These analyses were

discussed with the entire class.

32

In an earlier publication (Cropley, 2005) we went into

some detail of the use of the indicators in Table 2 to grade

the mousetrap-powered wheeled vehicles. (The mousetrap was a

conventional wooden trap with a spring loaded wire arm that is

released by tripping a lever when a mouse tries to remove a

bait, traditionally a piece of cheese. The arm then flies in

an arc and strikes the mouse with considerable force.) Most

students succeeded in designing and building a model that

worked, but the various designs received overall scores

ranging from below 10 to above 17. It is not strictly relevant

for the purposes of this article, but the models included a

very lifelike racing car built around the mousetrap and a

small paper cylinder (redefinition of “wheeled”) placed

alongside a tiny fan mounted on an axle. Both the car and the

fan were powered by a string wound around an axle and attached

to the spring—upon being released the spring flew in an arc,

pulling the string, which unwound from the axle causing it to

spin, and in the one case drove the car forward and in the

other caused the fan to spin, which in turn propelled the

lightweight paper wheel forward. Other designs included a

steam engine driven by burning the mousetrap, i.e., by

33

releasing the chemical energy stored in the mousetrap, and

simply attaching the mousetrap to a model car with a long

string and throwing the mousetrap off the table, i.e.,

utilising the force of gravity acting on the mousetrap’s mass.

The rating system functioned well in making it possible

to explain to students where their designs was highly

“creative” (in our sense), and where they displayed

weaknesses. For instance, the fan car mentioned above was

particularly strong on diagnosis, replication, re-direction,

re-initiation, and generation (see Table 2), but fell down on

convincingness and pleasingness. The model racing car, on the

other hand, scored highly on convincingness and pleasingness,

but did little diagnosis, prescription or prognosis. Students

were quickly able to see the point and even to make their own

suggestions for reducing weaknesses or building on strengths.

Closing remarks

In order to harness “…the materials and forces of nature

for the benefit of mankind,” as defined by ABET, and not

merely to expend those resources without regard to the wider

cost, creativity must play an integral role. To teach students

how to achieve creative designs, we must first be able to

34

specify what is creative in their designs. The concept of

functional creativity leads directly to an approach to

assessment based on a hierarchy of four criteria: relevance

and effectiveness; novelty; elegance; genesis. The indicators

of these four elements of creativity presented in this article

are relatively fuzzy, but this can be seen as an advantage in

the sense of Kimbell (2001), because a degree of fuzziness in

concepts encourages a holistic approach and leaves room for

the exercise of teachers’ professional judgement. These

considerations address Lewis’s (2005) issue of assessment.

Once students’ design work can be assessed for its creativity,

an appropriate pedagogy can be constructed around this, thus

addressing Lewis’ second issue. The class described in the

case study presented here gives some idea of what such a

pedagogy could be like.

35

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Table 1: The hierarchical organization of solutions

Criterion

Kind of Solution

Quasi-creative

Routine

Original Elegant

Inno-vative

Effectiveness

- + + + +

Novelty + - + + +Elegance - - - + +Genesis - - - - +

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Table 2. Indicators of creativity in solutions

Criterion of creativity

Kindof solution

Propertyof the

solution

Indicator

Relevance and Effectiveness

routine

Solutiondisplays

knowledge ofexisting factsand principles

• correctness (solution accuratelyreflects what is already known) • performance (solution does what it is supposed to) • appropriateness (solution fits within task constraints)

Novelty

original

Solution drawsattention to

problems in whatalready exists

• diagnosis (solution draws attention to shortcomings in what already exists) • prescription (solution shows howwhat already exists could be improved)• prognosis (solution helps beholder to anticipate likely effects ofchanges )

Solution adds to

existingknowledge

• replication (solution is capable of being transferred to new settings) • redefinition (solution helps beholder see new ways of using it) • combination (solution involves new mixtures of existing elements); • incrementation (solution extends the known in an existing direction)

45

• reconstruction (solution shows that an approach previously abandoned is still useful)

Solutiondevelops

newknowledge

• redirection (solution shows how to extend the known in a new direction) • reinitiation (solution indicates a radically new approach) • generation (solution offers a fundamentally new perspective)

Elegance

elegant

Solution strikesobservers asbeautiful(externalelegance)

• recognition (the beholder sees at once that the solution “makes sense”) • convincingness (the solutionis skilfully executed, well-finished, etc)• pleasingness (the beholder finds the solution neat, graceful, welldone)

Solution is wellworked out andhangs together

(internalelegance)

• completeness (the solution is well worked out and “rounded”)• harmoniousness (the elements of the solution fit together in an internally consistent way)

Genesis

innovative

Ideas in thesolution gobeyond theimmediatesituation

• foundationality (the solution suggests a general basis for furtherwork)• transferability (the solution offers ideas for solving apparently unrelated problems)

• germinality (the solution suggests new

ways of looking at existingproblems)

46

• seminality (the solution draws attention to previously unnoticed problems

47