Quantifying students’ collective creativity in designing soft matter experiments

Abstract

Creativity is an important higher order cognitive skill in solving physics problems. However, it is notoriously difficult and time-consuming to measure. Nowadays, solving complex physics problems is mostly done by multiple research groups in parallel. In such contexts, it is essential that the research community as a whole generates creative solutions to the problem at hand, motivating the need for collective creativity. We apply various methods to quantify collective creativity to undergraduate students’ open-ended experimental design proposals in the physics subfield of soft matter. We compare and discuss the three most promising of these methods. After comparison, a probability-based metric of the proposal distribution emerged as the most valid and distinctive quantification of collective creativity. It is capable of resolving year-to-year variations in collective creativity that are not readily apparent from qualitative inspection alone. This new metric can inform evidence-based decisions on how lab courses may be adapted to more effectively stimulate students’ collective creativity.