Creativity and the Research University

The world is obviously in considerable turmoil at the moment, and predictability is in shorter supply than usual.  The role of the US in the world is changing rapidly, and we must struggle to maintain our competitiveness in many dimensions.  Under these trying circumstances, I am tempted to reflect once again on what the role of the research university might be in the next decades. One of the keys to being successful in the competition of  a global knowledge economy is to be more creative than the opposition.  Thus it would seem to be a worthwhile time to reflect on what higher education can do to help creativity.  This is an open ended question, and thus the following should considered to be a beginning,  an imagination of some of the changes that might lead to a more Creative University.  I invite my readers to jump in with their take on this question.

I see that universities can contribute to the creativity of three constituencies:

• students - how do we educate students so that we unleash their creative capacity?
• faculty - how do we organize our institution and reward faculty so that they can reach their creative potential?
• regional - what role can a university play in helping a region to become a center of economic growth in creative technologies?

Before talking about these three roles, let me review some general characteristics of creativity that I find useful in thinking about this issue.  I have spoken before about Csikszentmihalyi’s systems approach .  He emphasizes that a creative idea comes out of a three-part system composed of: a domain consisting of symbolic rules and procedures; a field composed of the judges or gatekeepers to changes in domain; and the person with the idea. Csikszentmihalyi emphasizes that all must work together for an idea to be judged as creative, i.e. enter into the domain. As a consequence,  there is no such thing as a creative idea in the abstract. Rather the idea must be judged as creative by some set of humans - and the judgements may change over time as the people in the field change.

Teresa Amabile has looked in detail at the characteristics of the creative person. Clearly, there are “talents” and “personality characteristics”correlated with creativity that are to large degree innate, especially for those of great creativity.  However, there are also a number of aspects of creativity that can be very important for almost everyone. Amabile defines these as: teachable domain relevant skills; teachable creativity relevant skills; and motivation.

The domain relevant skills are really the set of facts, approaches, and connections out of which one can construct a creative solution to some problem. These  include a broad knowledge of the basic factual knowledge of the domain, the principles that pull together these facts, the techniques or scripts that have been developed to manipulate information in the domain, and an understanding of what is considered to be “new” in the domain.  A critical component of domain skill is that the facts be organized and stored in the individual’s mind according to general principles, not specific contextual tidbits.  This is often referred to as expert knowledge, and it leads to flexibility of thinking within the domain, rapid recall of facts, etc.

There are many creativity relevant skills described by Amabile and others. Among the most important are: breaking perceptual set, that is being able to see objects, ideas in new ways ; understanding of and comfort with complexity; keeping responses open as long as possible; suspending judgement; using wide categories to categorize information in order to better see relationships; having the ability to break out of well used algorithms, scripts; and knowing  creativity aids (heuristics)  for generating new ideas.

Amabile has shown that creativity most often correlated with intrinsic motivation - self determination.  And correspondingly, extrinsic motivation most often negative in stimulating creativity - it is the opposite of self determination. Extrinsic motivation can be positive, however, if it seems to confirm competence without connoting control.  It can also be beneficial if it enables the individual to do exciting work, again, without seeming to connote control. For example, after the famous “aha” phase of creativity, there is a period in which considerable work is needed to test the viability of the idea, and move it along to a point that the field can begin to evaluate it. Extrinsic motivation (resources) can be invaluable and positive at this point.  In my view, two of the most important results concerning the motivational aspect of creativity are that failure is a necessary part of the creative process that can provide valuable information, and that institutional encouragement of creativity is very important.

Yet a third aspect of creativity that can be useful in imagining what a university can do has been described by Richard Ogle, who views creativity from a network perspective. He also emphasizes that the creative person is not alone. She is hooked into a network of ideas created by others - the domain, and into a network of the field that will judge her ideas.  Learning how to get into these networks is critical, and much of creativity can be viewed as being able to see how to hook into a different network of ideas and bring some of these ideas back to your network.  My favorite demonstration of this aspect is described in my discussion of InnoCentive, Inc.

I will consider the first of these three areas of the creative university, the creative student, in this post, and the other two in a subsequent post.

I. The creative student

With this overly brief background, let me address the first question above - how can we better educate students in order to unleash their creativity?  The first step is to look at the ways that we teach truly basic skills such as critical thinking and postformal reasoning, which form a base upon which Amabilie’s domain relevant skills rest.  Unfortunately, as I  discussed earlier, evidence indicates that we do a very poor job of teaching both.  As shown by Pasceralla and Terenzine, the average senior (defined as having been at the 50th percentile of his freshman class in critical thinking level) has moved up after four years of college only to the entering critical thinking level of the freshman who was at the 69th percentile of their entering class.  Less than a standard deviation change in critical thinking over a college career! Results on postformal reasoning - ill-structured problems without “correct” answers because “ there is likely to be conflicting or incomplete information, unspecifiable problem parameters, and a number of plausible solutions, none of which may be verifiably correct” -  are equally dismal.  Derek Bok succinctly describes the results :

Only a small minority of seniors emerge convinced that ill-structured problems are susceptible to reasoned arguments based on evidence and that some answers are sounder than others.

The good news/ bad news is that we know how to teach these key skills much more effectively - but it requires changes in our typical teaching approaches.  In particular, it requires close integration of ideas and principles across courses and disciplines, and that requires having many courses and programs be owned by  groups of interacting  faculty representing multiple disciplines, rather than by individual faculty each doing his or her thing. 

The next step is to consider the domain relevant skills, in particular expert knowledge.  Some of the characteristics of expert knowledge are: an understanding of the core concepts of the domain; an organization of learned content around core concepts; ability to notice features and meaningful patterns of information; an understanding of the contexts of applicability of concepts and techniques; an ability to flexibly retrieve important knowledge with little intentious effort; and an ability to monitor one’s own approach to problem solving.  We typically trip over the first step - giving our students a real understanding of the core concepts.  In my own field of physics , where this problem has been extensively studied, we know that in a typical introductory class, the students learn about 20% of the core concepts that are “taught”.  Again, the good news is that we know how to do much better, and the bad news is that it requires accepting a very different approach to teaching than usually followed.   Bottom line, if we want to enable our students to be more creative, we have to be prepared to make the instructional changes that will enable us to do a much better job with the basic skills of creative thinking and postformal reasoning, and a much better job with domain relevant skills.

The teachable creativity relevant skills are somewhat of a different matter.  There are a number of “free standing” creativity training programs, such as

• brainstorming- group idea-finding
•  synectics - make the strange familiar, make the familiar strange using analogies and metaphore
•  Creative Problem Solving - 5 (or 6) stages of problem solving with checklists of techniques (heuristics)

There is even a famous Stanford Business School course that includes a bit of everything.  However, in general, creativity training is not integrated into domain studies in postsecondary institutions. At the K-12 level,  Sternberg and Grigorenko have described ways to embed some forms of creativity training in domain studies, but generally integration into domain studies remains sparse.

Although I don’t know any data that would support this statement, it seems to me that the real power of these creativity training approaches will only be felt when they become a natural component of domain studies. Thus, for example, one should focus on embedding heuristics in domain studies: rearrange the elements of the problem; think in terms of classes of elements instead of specifics; look for ways to get part way to the goal; in generating ideas, think less of validity, and more with its value in setting off other ideas; try something counter intuitive; make the familiar strange, and the strange familiar; play with ideas.

I would like to put in a plug at this point for experiential learning.  One form of experiential learning, service learning, has been shown under certain conditions to be highly effective at increasing both the basic skills discussed above, and domain relevant skills.  Again, the conditions are that it be done right - e.g.,regular reflection on the part of the student, tie-ins that relate academic experiences to the service experiences. I believe - without any data - that other forms of experiential learning are similarly powerful in this context. For example, as many of us know from experience, undergraduate students who are actively involved in faculty research programs can show remarkable intellectual growth when given the right supervision.   In addition, among the things the undergraduate is likely to see while participating in a research program is a modeling of the use of creativity heuristics within a domain. I believe that other types of experiential learning experiences can be organized such that all of these benefits occur. 

With regards motivation, Amabile emphasizes the importance of choice- self control over work, including methods and tasks. Reward is negative if viewed as controlling, or positive if viewed as recognition of good performance, or helping to show ways to improve performance.  This means that feedback of faculty to students, and how it is done, is very important.  Punishment, on the contrary, is always a negative motivation for creativity.  Reasonable chance taking must be encouraged, which means that inevitable failure must be welcomed as a means to learn, not a reason for concern.  High but reasonable expectations are important, as is providing appropriate levels of challenge. In this context, one can see that we have built a bad motivational system - advancement is strongly based on grades, so the rewards are clearly controlling. Similarly, failure is very costly (think of the impact of a B on a student wanting to get into one of the best Medical Schools). Playful intellectual experimentation is not a priority!

A provost I knew worked at a university that had students whose SAT’s and GPA’s clearly defined them as among the very best in the world. He said to me one day,” Lloyd, these students will never amount to anything.” When I pushed him to defend this outrageous statement, he responded, “ They have never taken an intellectual chance in their lives. They have never undertaken anything where they risked failure.  How can they have any creativity?”  A powerful - and sad - commentary on the system we have built.

A word needs to be said about uses of technology in all of these aspects of creativity enhancement. Technology is, of course, being used more and more in the classroom.  However, in my experience, it is seldom used with a good understanding of the principles that lead to improvements in the areas discussed above.  The one major exception that I see is in the teaching of domain skills in introductory physics, where new technology enhanced approaches are very much based on learning research. As might be expected, some of those approaches are spilling over into other domains.  However, a wide-sweeping approach that ties together advanced technology with learning and motivation research in pursuit of increasing creativity has not yet been undertaken, to my knowledge.

At the graduate level, many (most?) of our courses are simply extensions of undergraduate courses - and so typically have all of the failings discussed above in terms of increasing expert knowledge.  Since these are students with demonstrated  drive and determination to become experts, we need to help them by reforming our teaching approaches using these known techniques.  Similarly, we should review whether organizing courses by narrow sub-specialty makes sense at the graduate level where ability to combine knowledge and techniques from different areas is critical. Close student-faculty interactions are a hallmark of graduate education, especially through the thesis.  During the interactions of thesis work, the benefits of modeling in increasing student creativity are great, especially if the adviser works to see that the student is modeling heuristics, not algorithms. 

Finally, at both graduate and undergraduate levels, we need to provide training in group processes, since so much of creativity today is revolves around the group.  This is an area that is almost completely ignored at present, but will be increasingly central to the success of our graduates.  We need to be particularly careful at the graduate level of focusing too narrowly on individual accomplishment, thus frustrating the kinds of network interactions described by Ogle.

Comments

[Charles Jannuzi]

One aspect of research that gets overlooked is simply sheer repetitiveness--hardly something we think of as creative. The overall effect of science might be one of success (we notice the successes) and so a result of creativity. But being a research university, I get the impression that if there is creativity it is not really a conscious effort. It's basic science and research kit experimentation and then a lot of puzzling to find results that were not predicted and figuring out why.

Lloyd comments: thanks for the comment Charles. You are certainly correct. Edison is oft quoted as saying "Creativity is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." And the reality of creativity is that it is often iterative rather than linear, with the elaboration of ideas leading one to go back to the insight stage, then on to elaboration again, etc.