IGE: Creative Interdisciplinary Research in Graduate Education (CIRGE)

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Creativity is at the heart of innovation, and yet STEM graduate courses are rarely devoted to explicitly teaching creative practices and problem-solving strategies. Instead, graduate students often struggle to develop creative thinking skills on their own. Graduate training also typically takes place within academic silos that limit students' exposure to other disciplinary approaches and cross-disciplinary problem solving. This National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) award to Drexel University will test the purposeful infusion of creative thinking and problem solving into the STEM graduate curriculum within an interdisciplinary space. The project will test whether such an approach can enhance creativity and collaborative problem-solving skills beyond the boundaries of the classroom and beyond an individual discipline. The goal is to train students in best practices for team-based research by providing a versatile skill set to address team processes and interpersonal issues and foster synergy towards arriving at creative solutions that exceed those achieved by a collection of individuals.Two graduate courses will be developed in creativity to explicitly expose students to creative practices and problem-solving strategies within an interdisciplinary team space. The two courses will allow students to discover recent advances in creativity research and practice. During the courses, students will apply these principles by devising team-based solutions to STEM-related societal problems and by creatively improving student thesis research. The project has an implementation component to ensure smooth integration across university disciplines and a research component that evaluates the effectiveness of the courses in enhancing creativity, problem-solving and team practices. The research component will examine student, peer, and faculty stakeholders using a mixed-methods, longitudinal approach to generate formative and summative assessments. The goal is to arrive at an evidence-based set of learning experiences for enhanced creative practices and improved problem solving. Dissemination of these results may provide a platform for other institutions to adapt.The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community.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.