Creativity and its Assessment in a Design and Development of Food Products and Processes Course

Abstract

Creative thinking in higher education can only be expressed productively within a particular domain. The student must have a strong foundation in the strategies and skills of the domain in order to make connections and synthesize. While demonstrating solid knowledge of the domain's parameters, the creative thinker, at the highest levels of performance, pushes beyond those boundaries in new, unique, or atypical re-combinations, uncovering or critically perceiving new syntheses and using or recognizing creative risk-taking to achieve a solution. Thus, a didactic intervention and its corresponding assessment was implemented with the purpose of enhancing creative thinking and improving the food product design and development processes in the studied Design and Development of Food Products and Processes capstone course. Assessment of creativity was grounded on the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT), which is based on the idea that the best measure of creativity regardless of what is being evaluated, is the assessment by experts in that field. Therefore, a group of experts in the FE field were invited to evaluate capstone course final projects and developed food products by means of the Creative Thinking VALUE Rubric, which is made up of a set of attributes that are common to creative thinking across disciplines . Possible performance levels were entitled capstone or exemplar (value of 4), milestones (values of 3 or 2), and benchmark (value of 1). Instructor, peer-, and selfassessments were also performed throughout the course and on final project. Additionally, a Specific Course Rubric that included technical aspects regarding food product development as well as abilities of the team to present their product and answering questions raised during oral and poster presentations, and during tasting of developed food products. For this specific rubric, the scale varied from 1 (novice) to 4 (expert). Mean values from Creative Thinking VALUE Rubric assessment of final projects were 2.35 for Acquiring Competencies (attaining strategies and skills within a particular domain), 2.42 for Taking Risks (may include personal risk, fear of embarrassment or rejection, or risk of failure in successfully completing assignment, i.e. going beyond original parameters of assignment, introducing new materials and forms, tackling controversial topics, advocating unpopular ideas or solutions), 2.44 for Solving Problems, 2.44 for Embracing Contradictions, 2.40 for Innovative Thinking (novelty or uniqueness of idea, claim, question, form, etc.), and 2.24 for Connecting, Synthesizing, and Transforming. Regarding the Specific Course Rubric some teams performed better than others in selected aspects, probably due to the content and explanations given during presentations of their products. For the product design category, teams projects received scores higher than 2.5, which correspond to an intermediate level performance.