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Students Creativity Assessment Through Gray’s “Forward Flow” Tool: A Preliminary Study

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Design Tools and Methods in Industrial Engineering II (ADM 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering ((LNME))

Abstract

The promotion of creativity in education is intended to address many of the political challenges and goals for the development of a country, but among all of them the role of creativity in technology and economics is seen as crucial in helping nations to achieve higher employment, better economic performance and to cope with global competition.

This study, currently in its preliminary phase, aims to compare the creativity levels of first-year students at a medium-sized Italian university. The degree courses in Engineering Management, Mechanical Engineering, Law and Motor Sciences were analyzed.

In this analysis, students’ creativity is measured with the “Forward Flow” test by Gray et al. This test implements a new metric that uses latent semantic analysis to measure the evolution of thoughts over time. Operationally, students are asked to produce a sequence of semantically related words from a given initial word. Latent semantic analysis calculates the semantic distance between words by examining the frequency with which they appear together in a very large collection of documents. Studies conducted on the test, found in the literature, reveal that Forward Flow can predict the creativity of college students. According to these studies, even that membership in real-world creative groups (e.g. professional actors or entrepreneurs) is statistically predicted by scores on the Forward Flow test, even when controlling for divergent thinking.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Brescia, via Branze 38, 25123, Brescia, Italy

    Ileana Bodini, Mariasole Bannò, Diego Paderno, Gabriele Baronio, Stefano Uberti & Valerio Villa

Authors
  1. Ileana Bodini
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  2. Mariasole Bannò
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  3. Diego Paderno
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  4. Gabriele Baronio
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  5. Stefano Uberti
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  6. Valerio Villa
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ileana Bodini .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Ingegneria Gestionale, dell’Informazione e della Produzione, Univesita Degli Studi di Bergamo, Dalmine, Bergamo, Italy

    Caterina Rizzi

  2. Dipartimento di Ingegneria Meccanica e Aerospaziale, Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy

    Francesca Campana

  3. Dipartimento di Ingegneria Meccanica e Aerospaziale, Sapienza Università di Roma, Roma, Italy

    Michele Bici

  4. Dipartimento di Ingegneria "Enzo Ferrari", Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy

    Francesco Gherardini

  5. Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Palermo, Italy

    Tommaso Ingrassia

  6. Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Roma, Italy

    Paolo Cicconi

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Bodini, I., Bannò, M., Paderno, D., Baronio, G., Uberti, S., Villa, V. (2022). Students Creativity Assessment Through Gray’s “Forward Flow” Tool: A Preliminary Study. In: Rizzi, C., Campana, F., Bici, M., Gherardini, F., Ingrassia, T., Cicconi, P. (eds) Design Tools and Methods in Industrial Engineering II. ADM 2021. Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91234-5_89

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91234-5_89

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-91233-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-91234-5

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