Ahead of the Curve: Promoting Creative Problem-Solving in the Business Classroom

Presenter Information

Christine Miller
Laura Cruz

Presentation Type

Workshop

Start Date

9-30-2020 12:30 PM

End Date

9-30-2020 1:45 PM

Abstract

This interactive workshop asks participants to actively engage in a set of creative problem-solving exercises that were deployed in our study withundergraduate business students.

Description

There is an increasing demand from many stakeholders for higher education faculty to do more to enhance the ability of students, especially thoseoutside of the arts, to engage in creative thinking and/or creative problem-solving. Only recently, though, have scholars suggested that creativity is a skillthat can be learned and, by extension, taught. This means that efforts to develop evidence-based practice in teaching for creativity are only beginning toemerge. The desire for creative problem-solving is especially evident in the field of business; yet, a spate of recent studies suggest that businessstudents lag behind other disciplines in their exposure to creative problem-solving. Our study analyzes whether undergraduate business majors canbecome more adept at creative problem-solving through participation in a series of classroom-based creative thinking exercises with real-worldapplications. For the study, students from three sections of undergraduate management courses completed pre- and post- tests of their creative thinkingabilities. Our findings suggest that not only did students significantly improve their creative thinking skills, they did so in a manner that suggests adistinctive pattern within the business context. These experiences led to the identification of a number of best practices for others seeking to developsignature pedagogies focused on teaching for creativity in other disciplinary contexts. This interactive workshop will provide participants with an overviewof the exercises, findings, and implications of the study as well as they opportunity to discuss how we can all teach (and how students learn) to thinkahead of the curve.

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