A Creative Experience for Chemical, Food, and Environmental Engineering Students in a Material Balances Course

Creative thinking includes the capacity to combine or synthesize existing ideas, images, or expertise in original ways and the experience of thinking, reacting, and working in an imaginative way characterized by a high degree of innovation, divergent thinking, and risk taking. Despite all that has been demonstrated regarding problem solving and creative thinking, many engineering schools are still relying on the traditional lecture-homework-quiz format of well-defined problems and single correct answers. Unfortunately, while efficient, this format has not shown to be effective at producing the critical, innovative thinking skills needed to solve difficult technological problems . This paper describes a module for promoting students’ creativity in a Material Balances second semester required course for Chemical, Food, and Environmental Engineering at Universidad de las Américas Puebla (Mexico). Major goals include stimulating and strengthening student cognitive flexibility that could allow them to be creative thinkers. The proposed four classsessions module is an active and cooperative experience that was implemented as course final project. Students explored creativity through multiple representations of a problem that should be presented in written, graphic, and audio-visual manner to an expert audience for its evaluation. According to the Cognitive Flexibility Theory , multiple representations of knowledge promote the transfer of abstract knowledge to different contexts while cognitive flexibility is one of the four base elements of creativity. For the design of the learning environments of the module, we followed Jonassen. Final projects were presented to experts in the field that assessed student creative thinking by means of a rubric adapted from the Investment Theory of Creativity developed by Sternberg and Lubart 8, , which provided a multidimensional assessment of creativity. Additionally a Fluency Rubric was developed, which was divided into four modules that correspond to each project deliverable (dossier, poster, video, and oral presentation). Students were able to build concrete examples of a material balance in an everyday situation and represent them in many ways (physically, verbally, symbolically, and by means of a multimedia presentation). Mean values from rubric assessment of final projects were 3.13 for creative performance, 3.80 for knowledge of domain (application of formal and informal knowledge), 3.31 for intellectual style (includes indicators such as autonomy and rules), 3.28 for motivation (level of commitment, project pride, and interest in task), 3.02 for intellectual processes (which includes indicators such as sensitivity, problem identification, ideation, ability to recognize ideas that have potential to be valued, as well as ability to sell your ideas effectively and persuade of its value), and 2.90 for creative personality (with indicators such as tolerance for ambiguity, risk taking, will, and perseverance). The vast majority of students attained final project expected outcomes at an acceptable level. P ge 2.40.2