2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A Measure of Inventive Mindset for Use in K-12 Engineering and Invention Education

Invention education programs offer a context for building students’ engineering and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) skills as well as inventive self-perceptions and habits of mind that can promote persistence in innovation and commercialization-oriented careers (Lemelson Foundation, 2020). However, research challenges remain in this area because few validated measures of children’s inventive mindset exist, and little is known about the relations between inventive mindset and engineering and STEM identity. To address this gap, the proposed paper presents a confirmatory factor analysis of the Inventive Mindset (IM) questionnaire (Authors, et al. 2021), a nine-item Likert scale measure designed for use with upper elementary and middle school students. In this validation study, N=462 participants (n=258 male, n=199 female, n=5 did not disclose; n=304 White, n=72 Black, n=54 two or more races, n=21 Hispanic/Latinx, n=9 Asian, n=1 American Indian or Alaska Native, n=1 did not disclose) completed both the IM scale and a set of STEAM identification items upon completion of a week-long out-of-school-time program focusing on invention education. Using IBM SPSS AMOS, the IM measure was examined using maximum likelihood. Standardized regression weights for all nine items ranged from β = .34 - .74, with only two items below .45. The factors were permitted to correlate, and did so significantly (r = .79, p < .001). Two factors emerged: ingenuity, including children’s perceptions of their creativity, imagination, idea generation and sharing; and solution-seeking, which included children’s perceptions of their problem-solving skills, openness to ideas, desire for making improvements, and tenacity. Fit indices were adequate (Ben-Shachar, et al., 2020): the Normed Fit Index (NFI) was .91; the Relative Fit Index (RFI) was .87; the Incremental Fit Index (IFI) was .93; the Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) was .90, the Comparative Fit Index (CFI) was .93, and the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) was .07. No items posed concerns for error covariance via high modification indices, and the measure presented with acceptable internal consistency reliability (α = .78, ω = .78), indicating that the model required no additional modifications. The analysis replicated a prior exploratory factor analysis using a separate sample of respondents (Authors, et al. 2021). Except for identification with technology, the STEAM identity items were found to be significantly associated with solution-seeking and ingenuity subscale scores. The findings suggest that the Inventive Mindset measure has adequate model fit and evidence for its construct validity as a tool for assessing students’ self-perceptions of ingenuity and solution-seeking in the context of invention and engineering education activities. The proposed paper will include the full measurement model and all the items used in the validation study. It will discuss potential uses for the measure and its ancillary items in designing and evaluating STEM-oriented invention education programming for young and diverse audiences.