Abstract:

Creativity is an crucial skill for engineers who are solving problems, developing new innovations and changing the world. Creative engineers should be able to generate novel solutions to specific engineering problems based on their knowledge through team work. Engineers after graduating need to be able to demonstrate creativity to show that they can contribute to this in some way. Universities around world are increasingly expected to provide more opportunities that foster creativity in engineering students. Creativity education in engineering is an ongoing critical issue. It may be the first step to understand their levels of creativity for engineering students to help them develop creative competencies.

Gender gap in engineering has been a key topic in engineering. Women have a tendency to underrate their abilities, even though they have higher average GPAs than men. Engineering fields are also marked by notable gender disparities in participation, performance, and rewards. Undergraduate education, specifically, is important to understanding and addressing the gender disparity in engineering because this educational stage strongly influences the composition of the future engineering workforce.

Therefore, this study was to investigate gender differences in creativity among engineering students in college in Korea. The sample group consisted of 320 engineering students. 200 were males and 120 were females. They were administered self-report measures of domain general and domain specific of creativity. The engineering creativity test was developed by Kang and Yoon(2005) based on the domain specific of creativity. The test consists of four sub-factors such as creative attitude, research of knowledge, interests in engineering, and team work ability. The domain general creativity test consists of three sub-factors such as creative motivation, creative attitude and creative potency.

There were the high correlations among the sub factors and the significant mean differences between gender in the domain general creativity test and engineering creativity test. The results showed that women were less creative than men. The results of this study also indicated that an undergraduate engineering education needs to provide more female-friendly curriculum for women in engineering to develop their creativity.

Keywords:

Engineering creativity, gender, egnieering education.