Engrafting Innovation and Leadership in Civil Engineering Education

Literature Review & Background

Engineering profession is often associated with extensive problem solving. Therefore the ability to solve problems creatively has been identified as one of the imperative competencies for graduating students by engineering associations worldwide (National Academy of Engineering[NAE] 2005). It has been reported that the traditional methods of teaching engineering students do not necessarily succeed in enhancing their problem solving and creativity skills (Belski et al.2013). It was also reported that significant differences exist in problem solving approaches of engineering experts and novices and that these differences need to be taken into account whilst developing and improving engineering curricula (Harlim & Belski, 2013]. Although creativity has been investigated extensively over the last 50 years, there are still significant differences between researches in the definition of creativity (Weisberg, 2006). Creativity researchers do not fully agree on the sources and prerequisites of creative performance. Some investigators suggested that creative performance in many domains requires gaining substantial domain knowledge (Sweller, 2009). Others advocated the importance of at least 10 year of extensive professional practice for attaining creative performance (Ericsson et al.1993). Research reports on differences between problem solving strategies deployed by novices and experts indicate that the conclusions drawn by investigators who researched with well-defined problems do not necessarily translate to the domain of ill-defined problems that are at core of the engineering profession (Cross, 2004).