2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work-in-progress study presents the Engineering Creativity Assessment Tool (ECAT), designed to systematically evaluate the creative productivity of engineering students by considering both the novelty of their ideas and the practicality of their implementations. Grounded in the 4P Model of Creativity, ECAT emphasizes the synergy between “seed” creativity and the structured, context-driven processes required to transform imaginative potential into innovative solutions. While existing engineering education assessments often focus on technical precision, the ECAT framework highlights the multifaceted nature of creativity, recognizing how fluency, originality, flexibility, elaboration, resistance to premature closure, and creative strengths collectively shape creative productivity.

ECAT is adapted from the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT), a widely respected but underutilized method in engineering contexts. CAT leverages expert judgment to evaluate creativity and ensures reliability through inter-rater assessments, making it particularly well-suited for the nuanced, domain-specific evaluations of engineering projects. By incorporating multiple quasi-experts (advanced graduate engineering students), ECAT integrates professional-level criteria with authentic student experiences, reflecting real-world engineering challenges. During calibration sessions, these evaluators honed their scoring consistency and refined the assessment dimensions, balancing subjective insights with product-based measures.

Students’ creative outputs (n = 199) in this study were physical models constructed from basic materials within a constrained timeframe, coupled with short video explanations. This approach captures both the iterative process of engineering design and tangible outcomes. Although the data collection and evaluation are ongoing, the ECAT framework shows promise for producing a reliable measure of creative productivity. Once finalized, inter-rater reliability and various validity checks (content, convergent, and discriminant) will confirm the robustness of the instrument.

By offering a structured yet flexible assessment that values both imaginative exploration and practical function, ECAT hopes to serve as a diagnostic tool that could shift how engineering curricula address creativity. The long-term goal is to empower educators to identify gaps, refine pedagogical strategies, and ultimately cultivate engineers who can generate, refine, and implement innovative solutions with genuine impact.