Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Combining Creativity And Civilization: A Natural Experiment In A General Education University Course, Eric C. Dahlin, A. Brent Strong, Scott D. Grimshaw

Faculty Publications

Improving creativity and innovation is viewed as an increasingly important goal for classroom instruction. This paper evaluates whether a change in creativity occurred for students participating in a university “civilizations” course in which the instructional approach focuses on lateral thinking skills, examines characteristics of world civilizations that exhibited high levels of creativity, and encourages students to practice being creative through a class project and exams. Students in the class who took the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) at the beginning and again at the end of the semester experienced a statistically significant change in creativity scores compared with students …