Creativity throughout the Curriculum: Educational Practices to Build the STEM Workforce of Tomorrow

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The nation's economy and security require an engineering workforce that can design, manufacture, test, and deploy effective solutions to urgent, complex problems. In addition to developing traditional engineering skills, this workforce must also gain skills in innovation and creativity. This project aims to address this need by investigating a new paradigm of engineering education that integrates the foundations of science, engineering, problem-solving, and critical thinking with training in creative thinking, which is the foundation of innovation. The project will design, implement, and evaluate an experiential training program to help engineering educators teach creative thinking skills in sophomore-, junior-, and senior-level courses. The project's long-term goal is to increase student engagement and retention through novel instructional practices that prepare an innovative engineering workforce. The intellectual merits of this project include advancing knowledge about how to train an innovative workforce, investigating how focusing on innovation affects the persistence of engineering students, particularly under-represented minorities, and creating a transformative approach to engineering education that will produce an engineering workforce that is prepared to tackle complex, interdisciplinary problems. Standardized instruments will be used to assess aspects of student creativity, including design self-efficacy, resistance to change, and changes in creative thinking. The project's broader impacts include national dissemination of the pedagogical approach via publications, conferences, and workshops as well as research that may inform engineering education efforts to broaden participation of under-represented groups in engineering fields.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.