Improving Creativity In A Graduate Course

Abstract

The authors developed a strategy for improving students' creativity in CE 723-Pavement Systems Management, a graduate course in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The course taught in Summer 2004 was taken as the control group. This was taught using traditional lecture method. In Spring 2007, this course was taught using the strategy developed in this study. The strategy consisted of creative opportunities provided by the assignments given to the students, creativity on theoretical aspects of a specially designed test and student presentations of the solutions of the assignments. The assignments consisted of a series of modules for minimizing average vehicle delay to clear a busy signalized traffic intersection. Students were encouraged to think outside the box and come up with creative solutions from traffic engineering, geometric design, and signal design considerations. Several examples of creativity were given to the students in the form of handouts. Except this strategy, there was no difference between the control group and the Creative group. The improvements of all the six performance indices over the control group were determined using t tests. The improvements of all the indices were statistically significant at an alpha value of 0.05. Among the six indices, improvement in student presentations of the solutions to the assignments was ranked the highest. The authors consider this index to be the most important among the 6 indices because it provided the most number of creative avenues for the students. In this category, the control group had scored 52% on the average whereas the Creative group scored 65%. The Creative group showed a 25.0% improvement over the control group.