Influence of a Creative Problem-Solving Approach on College Students' Creativity and Its Relation With Team Cohesion

This study attempts to present further perspectives upon the effectiveness of developing creative thinking among engineering majors in college both through the incorporation of creative problem-solving (CPS) method and the influence of team cohesion in an engineering course so as to explore the impact of the proposed pedagogical approach on students' creative thinking. The 18-week course plan created in this research features the context of Industry 4.0. A total of 48 participants were enrolled in the course and divided into groups each of which was expected to develop a thematic project. To provide a holistic understanding of the CPS approach's influence on students' creativity, the present research applied a mixed methodology, which included survey questionnaires (team cohesion questionnaire), creativity measurement (creativity test), as well as semi-structured interviews. Descriptive statistics, t-test and Pearson product-moment correlation were adopted to analyze the quantitative results. Qualitative contents of semi-structured interviews were used to support the quantitative data. The results showed that the engineering college students had a significant improvement between their pre-test score on creativity and their post-test score. Furthermore, a significant change in students' types of creative thinking was also found in terms of their innovative creativity. Besides, interviews with student participants echoed with the quantitative results and showed preferences among students toward certain types of creativity. The qualitative results reveal how some students praised the benefits of the CPS steps as well as those of creative thinking techniques taught in class, how some of them also pointed out the difficulties and reasons that might have influenced their development of a team project, and how the same challenges caused them to struggle with creative thinking and the maintenance of team cohesion. Finally, the research results are summarized and limitations are acknowledged to engage instructors and future studies in a discussion about the implementation of creative training among students and about how it may facilitate their creative thinking.