A Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Examination of the Development of Innovation Capability in Undergraduate Engineering Students

Abstract

Multiple research studies have examined the role of the undergraduate engineering curriculum on students’ innovation capabilities. The majority of these studies have used cross-sectional samples to compare students at the beginning and end of their college careers, and most results have shown that seniors outperform freshmen. In the following paper, we use a combination of cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons to uncover when innovation capabilities grow. Over a two-year period, undergraduate engineering majors at different points in their college careers completed concept generation tasks. Their resulting concepts were scored for originality. While no difference was found from freshman to senior year using a cross-sectional comparison, a significant increase in originality was found between separate senior groups at the beginning and end of a capstone course. The difference between the senior groups occurred despite no difference between these students in academic performance or engineering design self-efficacy. In addition, a significant increase in originality was found from junior to senior year using a longitudinal analysis. This increase in originality occurred without corresponding changes in academic performance or engineering design self-efficacy. These results are discussed in relation to prior research regarding the interplay between curricular and individual difference factors in the development of students’ innovation capabilities.

Abandoning creativity: The evolution of creative ideas in engineering design course projects

“…This was found to be true for design tasks that were subjectively intended to be ‗equivalent'. Interestingly, Kershaw, et al (2015) also found that the semester in which an engineering student is given a particular design problem can affect the creativity of the generated ideas. While these studies illustrate that the type, and timing, of a design problem in engineering education may impact student creativity training (see discussion in (Kremer, et al, 2011)), few studies have explored the impact of the design task being explored in the phases following idea generation.…”

Exploring Connections between Engineering Projects, Student Characteristics, and the Ways Engineering Students Experience Innovation

“…This result could, but does not necessarily, indicate a more comprehensive understanding of innovation among the less experienced first-year students. In a follow-up study, however, Kershaw and colleagues 19 found no significant group differences between first-year and senior students. In longitudinally comparing students on the same task during their junior and senior year, Kershaw and colleagues also found that students uniformly outperformed their junior scores as seniors.…”

The Relationship Between Design Outcomes and Mental States During Ideation

“…Novelty: We assessed novelty by using a decision tree. The approach we used to calculate this method is closely modeled after the decision trees used by Kershaw et al [62], which is adapted from the creative engineering design assessment (CEDA) approach [63]. We favored this approach over feature-level measures of novelty because many concepts simply did not give enough information to be broken down into features.…”

“…Quality: Shah argues that any method can be used [11] to measure quality, but recommends a weighted decision matrix. Because many concepts could not be broken down into features, we again measured quality at the concept-level by adapting the decision trees used by Kershaw et al [62]. The decision tree we used is shown in Fig.…”

“…The decision tree used to determine the quality of each concept. The tree was adapted from Kershaw et al[62].…”