Multidisciplinarity and Creativity of Engineering and Science Students MASSAC11JE S INSTITU)TEI 0F T CN OGY by JUN 21 Z017 Kristi Elena Oki LIBRARIES B.S., Yale University (2014) ARCHIVES Submitted to the Department of Mechanical Engineering in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY June 2017 @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2017. All rights reserved. Signature redacted Author ..... Department of Mechanical Engineering May 12, 2017 redacted Certified by .................. Signature Maria C. Yang Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Thesis Supervisor Accepted by ..... Signature redacted Rohan Abeyaratne Chairman, Department Committee on Graduate Theses 2 Multidisciplinarity and Creativity of Engineering and Science Students by Kristi Elena Oki Submitted to the Department of Mechanical Engineering on May 12, 2017, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering Abstract Engineering students must be prepared develop creative solutions to problems that fall at the intersection of multiple disciplines. In order to better understand the role of multidisciplinary learning and creativity within engineering education, this thesis explores the multidisciplinarity of expertise/interest and creativity of college and graduate-level engineering and science students. An online survey was designed to investigate the relationship between creativity and multidisciplinarity of students. Findings from the two creativity tests (Alternate uses and Consequences) revealed a positive correlation between quantity of ideas generated and novelty of ideas. As expected, level of expertise in the engineering and natural sciences disciplines overall was greater than expertise in other disciplines, but interest level was more spread out across disciplines. A substantial correlation between multidisciplinarity of ex- pertise/interest and creativity was not observed. However, findings based on sub- populations of the student sample suggest the possibility that multidisciplinarity and creativity may be correlated, but the nature of the relationship may differ depend- ing on other demographic factors such as gender, student status (undergraduate vs. graduate), or current field (engineering vs. sciences). Thesis Supervisor: Maria C. Yang Title: Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering 3 4 Acknowledgments I first wish to thank my advisor, Professor Maria Yang, for welcoming me into her lab and for giving me the opportunity to pursue my interests in design and education. Maria, thank you for being so warm and approachable ever since my first day at MIT and for guiding me along every step of my research project. I would like to thank all the members of the Ideation Lab for creating a comfortable and fun working environment. A special thank you to Janet-for your friendship and support as we worked on our surveys together, Anders-for the rewarding experience in 2.00 and for your advice on refining the survey, and Qifang-for your extremely helpful guidance on all of my questions about the analysis. I also wish to thank my friends and cousins who helped me test out drafts of the survey. To my parents-thank you so much for supporting me throughout all of my ed- ucation while never expecting too much from me. Mom, thank you for always being there for me and for being a constant source of love and encouragement. Dad, thank you for reminding me to take a step back to remember what is really important. To Abuelita-thank you for your support and for always looking out for my well-being. To my amazing sister Jessica-thank you for sharing your wisdom with me, for encouraging me to do what makes me happy, and for always making me laugh. I am so incredibly thankful to have you as my sister. Finally, to Brandon-thank you for all of your love and support throughout my entire time at MIT. Thank you for patiently helping me move forward whenever I was stuck and for always reminding me that you had faith in me. It is an understatement to say that I would not have been able to do this without you. 5 6 Contents 1 Introduction 13 2 Background 17 2.1 Defining multidisciplinarity ......... .......... 17 2.2 Student interdisciplinary assessment .............. 18 2.3 Bibliometric interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary assessment 19 2.4 Multidisciplinarity and creativity ............... 20 3 Methods 23 3.1 Survey design ................ ...... ...... 23 3.2 Creativity .................. ...... ...... 23 3.2.1 Creativity scoring .......... ........ .... 26 3.3 Multidisciplinarity of expertise and interest . ........ ... 26 3.3.1 Multidisciplinarity scoring ..... ............ 29 3.4 Demographics and Academic history .. ... .... .... 31 3.5 Survey distribution . ....... ..... ........ .... 31 4 Results 33 4.1 Participants ........ ....... .. ... ........ 33 4.2 Creativity tasks ...... ....... .. ............ 35 4.2.1 Alternate uses . ....... .... ........ ... 36 4.2.2 Consequences . ....... .... ........ ... 38 4.3 Disciplinary expertise and interest ..... ............ 41 7 4.4 Multidisiplinarity and creativity .. .... ... .... ... .... 43 5 Discussion 49 5.1 Lim itations ... .... ... .... .... ... .... ... .... 51 5.2 Future Work . .... ... .... ... .... ... .... ... ... 51 A Supporting documents 53 A.1 Levels of expertise ... ...... ...... ....... ...... 53 A.2 Revised Field of Science and Technology Classification . ..... .. 54 8 List of Figures 3-1 Consequences prompt shown to participants ........... ... 25 3-2 Sample expertise and interest questions from the online survey ... 28 3-3 Questions included as part of the academic history section of the online survey ............. ...................... 32 4-1 Number of respondents by discipline .................. 35 4-2 Percent occurrence of ideas from the Alternate uses task .... ... 36 4-3 Average participant novelty score based on quantity of responses on the Alternate uses task .. ............ ........... 37 4-4 Average novelty versus response order on the Alternate uses task .. 38 4-5 Number of novel responses as compared to quantity on the Alternate uses task ..... ............ ............ ..... 39 4-6 Percent occurrence of ideas from the Consequences task ........ 39 4-7 Average participant novelty score based on quantity of responses on the Consequences task ... ....................... 40 4-8 Average novelty versus response order on the Consequences task .. 41 4-9 Quantity of responses on the Alternate uses and Consequences tasks . 41 4-10 Average expertise in each discipline (all respondents). The black lines represent the standard deviation. ................ .... 42 4-11 Average interest in each discipline (all respondents). The black lines represent the standard deviation. .................... 43 4-12 Adapted Shannon diversity of expertise and interest .......... 43 9 4-13 Novelty on the Consequences task compared to average expertise in all disciplines ... ..... ...... ...... ...... ...... 46 4-14 Novelty on the Consequences task compared to average expertise in all disciplines: Male graduate student respondents .. .... ..... .. 47 4-15 Relationship between quantity on the alternate uses task and average interest in the humanities: Science student respondents ... ..... 48 4-16 Relationship between novelty on the consequences task and average ex- pertise in the natural sciences/engineering: Science student respondents 48 A-1 Descriptions and examples of each expertise level ... ...... .. 53 10 List of Tables 3.1 List of academic disciplines used in the online survey ......... 29 3.2 Conversion of expertise and interest ratings to numeric score ..... 30 3.3 Scores calculated from expertise and interest ratings .......... .30 4.1 Respondent demographics .............. .......... 35 4.2 Pearson correlations between creativity scores (*indicates significant p-value ...... ............ ............ ..... 42 4.3 Spearman correlations between interest and expertise in each disci- pline. All correlations are statistically significant (p-value less than .0 5 ). ... ........... ............ .......... 4 4 4.4 Pearson correlation of creativity scores and disciplinary measures (*in- dicates significant p-value) ........... ............. 45 4.5 Correlations between novelty on the consequences task and average expertise score for different student populations (*indicates significant p-value) .......... ............ ........... 46 4.6 Correlations between quantity of ideas on the alternate uses task and average interest in the humanities for students in the sciences vs. stu- dents in engineering ......... ........... ........ 47 4.7 Correlations between novelty on the consequences task and average expertise in the natural sciences and engineering for students in the sciences vs. students in engineering ...... ............. 48 A.1 2007 Revised Field of Science (FOS) and Technology Classification P art 1/2 [52]. .................. ............. 54 11 A.2 2007 Revised Field of Science (FOS) and Technology Classification Part 2/2 [52] .............. .................. 55 12 Chapter 1 Introduction The clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures- of two galaxies, so far as that goes- ought to produce creative chances. C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures [1] Today's engineers and scientists are being asked to tackle many issues that span disciplines, which requires a broader understanding that extends beyond engineering. This is often referred to as an