How does creativity enable innovators in science, technology, engineering and math to succeed and to find meaningful solutions to previously intractable problems? That鈥檚 exactly what wants to find out.
Green, a professor in the , is the lead investigator of a research group that just received $2.5 million from the National Science Foundation to study how creativity affects and predicts the success of undergraduate engineering students, both academically and professionally.
鈥淭his is an exciting opportunity to advance how we measure creativity at a time when creativity matters more than ever,鈥� said Green, a co-founder of The Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity. 鈥淭he project gives us a chance to identify how new approaches to creativity can provide a means for educating more creative STEM students, and for predicting academic and professional success outcomes鈥�
The grant will allow Green and his team to connect decades of research that demonstrates creativity is associated with STEM achievement with novel computational metrics of creativity that can reveal the specific components of creative thinking that support STEM success both during and after college.
鈥淲e want to identify which aspects of creativity are important for success,鈥� said Green. 鈥淲e鈥檙e breaking creativity down into four dimensions: visual versus verbal and generative versus evaluative.鈥�
Within those dimensions, Green and his team are looking to determine not only which are the best predictors of success, but how they work in tandem. The group will study two cohorts of STEM students: one tracked while in school and the other tracked after graduation. Both cohorts will undergo verbal and visual tests to evaluate their creativity.
Additionally, the team is seeking to map out creative ideation through what they call the shape of thought.
鈥淲e鈥檝e developed metrics that look at the trajectory of a person鈥檚 thought,鈥� said Green. 鈥淎s you generate ideas, whether it鈥檚 when you鈥檙e writing an essay or you generate hypotheses as part of a task that we set up, you travel through idea space and that travel has a shape that we can look at in semantic space.鈥�
Accurately assessing creativity has huge implications for both colleges and employers. Leveraging creativity will be important for employers who want to utilize AI to its fullest potential, according to Green.
鈥淐reativity is often associated with the humanities 鈥� and it should be 鈥� but there鈥檚 good evidence that creativity is important for success in the sciences,鈥� said Green. 鈥淎nd It鈥檚 only becoming more relevant: The kinds of skills that have determined success in the sciences, the quantitative skills, are increasingly replaceable with AI. Whereas more of the value that humans can bring to a project is found in creativity. Human creativity is going to be really important.鈥�
For colleges, recent research from Green suggests that creativity could be a useful metric for predicting academic success 鈥� and one that involves less bias than standardized testing.
A team of two dozen creativity experts, led by Green, trained a large language model to analyze college essays and assess creativity. The team, which has access to a dataset of more than 600,000 college applications, has found promising connections between creativity and future college success, while also finding that creativity shows substantially less performance disparity than many traditional admissions metrics.
鈥淲e鈥檙e really focusing on the essays and our ability to assess creativity in those essays and looking at whether or not that鈥檚 predictive of future college success,鈥� said Green. 鈥淲hen you combine creativity with the SAT, that combined metric outperforms either alone.鈥�
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