2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Creativity plays an important role in students’ engineering identity. Creativity reinforces students' perception of themselves as capable and effective engineers since it not only helps engineers develop problem-solving skills but also helps them understand problems better. Therefore, fostering students' creativity seems important for strengthening their engineering identity.
One way to foster students’ creativity is through artistic practices, given the inherent connection between creativity and the arts. Recent literature reviews in the engineering field explore how engineering education researchers are using artistic practices to foster creativity among engineering students, but this remains underrepresented in engineering education. Also, despite the growing emphasis on using artistic practices to foster creativity, a gap remains in understanding how prior artistic experiences influence students’ perceptions of creativity and how these artistic experiences help students integrate creativity into their engineering identities.
This work in progress (WIP) explored how arts experience shape engineering students’ attitudes toward creativity and their engineering identity. We conducted a quantitative study using a 35-item survey. The survey was divided into two constructs: the person and the sociocultural environment. These constructs were developed by intersecting the person and press dimensions from Rhodes’ Four P’s of Creativity framework with Godwin’s definition of engineering identity. The person construct focuses on the individual differences, perceptions, and experiences that affect one’s creative behavior and self-concept as an engineer. The sociocultural environment construct captures the external influences, such as social, cultural, and resources, that stimulate or constrain the development of creativity among engineering students.
Responses from 74 undergraduate students were analyzed using Wilcoxon Rank-Sum tests. Participants included 86% from Colombia and 13% from the United States; 31% were women and 69% were men, and 57% had taken arts classes before. Our results showed that students who had taken art classes were more likely to view creativity as a central part of their engineering identity and that these past experiences in the arts sparks their creativity. These findings support the idea that prior exposure to the arts acts as a positive sociocultural environment where creativity is valued and encouraged, allowing students to integrate it as part of their engineering identity. Furthermore, our results highlight that regardless of whether students have an artistic background, both groups perceived their curriculum as not flexible enough to allow them to express their creativity.
Together, our preliminary results could mean that cultivating creativity requires more than adding design challenges or artistic practice modules; it requires intentionally supporting students through positive recognition and validating multiple forms of creativity that help students to see themselves as creative engineers.