Can One Class Hour Improve Creative Problem Solving Self-efficacy

CONTEXT Development of engineers ready to work in the 21st Century requires engineering educators to revisit a set of skills that need development and to rethink learning outcomes to be achieved. Governments, business leaders and professional associations believe that enterprise skills, which include: digital literacy, interaction and creative problem solving skills are those most needed by university graduates in the 21st Century. This paper is devoted to the development of creative problem solving skills. PURPOSE To establish whether introducing students to simple thinking heuristics in class can change and improve their creative problem solving self-efficacy. APPROACH Over 700 students were enrolled in a first-semester, first-year subject related to the Engineers Without Borders (EWB) Challenge in which students work in groups to develop a solution to opportunities in a developing country. Tutors introduced students to thinking heuristics at an early stage (week 2) of the course for idea generation and midway through the course (week 7) to enhance technical content of their developing solutions. Approximately one hour of class time was devoted to exploring the understanding of these thinking tools. This varied to some degree between classes and included showing a 15 minute video introduction, including summaries of selected heuristics in tutorial activities and recommending students study more thinking heuristics from the TRIZ Repository (Edisons21.com). In order to establish changes in creative problem solving self-efficacy, students were surveyed at the beginning and the end of the semester. RESULTS The outcomes of the surveys are analysed. It was found that students' creative problem solving selfefficacy changed significantly during the progress of the course on some of the survey metrics applied. A component of this improvement is anticipated to be as a result of learning simple thinking heuristics. CONCLUSIONS It seems that devoting one hour of a face-to-face class to introduce an effective thinking heuristics can positively influence students' creative problem solving self-efficacy. In turn, improvement in creative problem solving self-efficacy is likely to make students more effective in generating appropriate solution ideas. Therefore, engineering educators need to consider embedding effective thinking heuristics into their existing discipline-based subjects.