Teaching Creative Process across Disciplines

While there is great interest in higher education about teaching creative process, there have been relatively few studies of how courses can facilitate the development of creative skills. The goal of this study was to document how college instructors structure courses intended to develop students’ creative processes. The study data included interviews from instructors and students using a critical case sample of fifteen courses at a single U.S. University. A qualitative analysis of the transcripts yielded a set of 14 pedagogical elements appearing across courses. Common elements were open‐ended projects and skill‐building activities, and less frequently, risk taking experiences and self‐reflection. The sample included undergraduate courses in engineering, education, the liberal arts, and the arts, and the elements observed were often shared across courses from different disciplines. These findings provide a diverse set of pedagogical approaches and opportunities for building creative process skills within undergraduate courses.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148345/1/jocb158.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148345/2/jocb158_am.pd

The role of predictive features in retrieving analogical cases

Access to prior cases in memory is a central issue in analogical reasoning. Previous research accounts for access in terms of overall similarity between complete new exemplars compared to complete stored instances and stresses the relative importance of surface-level similarities in access to complete cases (Gentner & Landers, 1985; Rattermann & Gentner, 1987). However, for cross-domain remindings, abstract similarities capture the important commonalities between cases ( Schank, 1982; Seifert, McKoon, Abelson, & Ratcliff, 1986). Therefore, models of analogy must account for structural-level remindings when they do occur in terms of abstract similarities. In planning and problem-solving tasks, a stored exemplar may be more useful if accessed before the new pattern is complete, when past experience can bring to bear possible solutions or warn of potential dangers while the outcome is yet undetermined. Further, different partial sets of abstract features may result in differing access to analogous cases. Features that predict when prior cases might be useful to problem solving could serve as better retrieval cues than other abstract cues that are equally similar, yet less distinctive to the specific problem situation. To test these hypotheses, several experiments were conducted using thematic stories in a modification of the reminding paradigm developed by Gentner and Landers (1985). By examining the relative effectiveness of subsets of features in accessing relevant cases, it was found that a subset of abstract cue features predicting when a planning failure might occur led to more reliable access to complete prior analogies than did a subset of abstract features expressing specific information about planning decisions and outcomes. Further experiments show that how distinctly the feature sets characterize the conditions leading up to the planning decision point, and not differences in the overall similarity to the case, determines access based on abstract cues.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/29825/1/0000172.pd

The social psychology of seatbelt use

Two studies examined interventions to increase compliance with seat belt laws. Both studies included physical reminder objects and social influence elements. The first study with a lower base rate (and lower SES profile) showed a 20% improvement in compliance in the 2 weeks following the intervention. The second study had a higher initial base rate (85%), which increased to approximately 90% in the 2 weeks following the intervention. The improvement was significant for the larger (white) samples in the study, but only for drivers (not passengers). Because the physical reminder objects were rarely present in the cars on subsequent observation, it appears the social influence manipulations were responsible for the increase in compliance. Further study is needed to determine whether knowledge of future monitoring for the behavior, or simply knowledge of social comparison information, is responsible for these effects.U.S. Department of Transportation/NHTSA; Office of Behavioral Safety Research (OBSR)http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/86095/1/102761.pd

Design Heuristics in Engineering Concept Generation

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/94902/1/j.2168-9830.2012.tb01121.x.pd

Case-Based Learning: Predictive Features in Indexing

Interest in psychological experimentation from the Artificial Intelligence community often takes the form of rigorous post-hoc evaluation of completed computer models. Through an example of our own collaborative research, we advocate a different view of how psychology and AI may be mutually relevant, and propose an integrated approach to the study of learning in humans and machines. We begin with the problem of learning appropriate indices for storing and retrieving information from memory. From a planning task perspective, the most useful indices may be those that predict potential problems and access relevant plans in memory, improving the planner's ability to predict and avoid planning failures. This “predictive features” hypothesis is then supported as a psychological claim, with results showing that such features offer an advantage in terms of the selectivity of reminding because they more distinctively characterize planning situations where differing plans are appropriate.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/46907/1/10994_2004_Article_422599.pd