Measurement of Domain-Specific Creative Thinking in a Team Training Simulation

• In Event: 46.085 - Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: 46.085-18 - Design Issues Regarding the Use of Games and Simulations for Learning and Assessment

Abstract

Creative thinking is required in both organizations and people. The current military operating environment has become extremely complex (Fletcher, 2014). In some cases (e.g., complex, not predictable, and undefined tasks), there are no acceptable solutions that one has been trained for. Further some trained solution will lead to disastrous tactical results. For situations where one has not been trained or there is no Navy doctrine or one performs duties outside of one’s ratings, one must create a novel and useful solutions (creative thinking) and monitor than success or failure. Creative thinking was long considered domain-general, e.g., Torrance Test of Creative Thinking. We explored this hypothesis in the Multi-Mission Team Trainer (MMTT) environment. This simulation trains and assesses Navy Surface Warfare Officers in offensive and defensive ship tactics. We found some support, although the effects were weak (Author et al., 2014). In our study, all of the creative thinking subscales (with the exception of elaboration pretest) were showed to be reliable (Alpha greater than .70). With respect to the impact of the MMTT on creative thinking, none of the subscales were statistically significant, only the creativity-elaboration subscale approached statistical significance (p = .05). It increased after exposure to the Multi-Mission Team Trainer although the increase was small and not practically significant. We then correlated our creativity measures with our retention and transfer measures. The creativity measures of fluency (-.29) and flexibility (.-34) were statistically significant but unexpectedly negative. It may be that the Navy training focuses on “school solutions” and does not reward fluency and flexibility.

More recently, however, scholars have presented evidence indicating that creative thinking is also domain- or task-specific and not only as domain-general (Authors, 2013; Author, 2014). Our current creative thinking research is building on our prior work in the Multi-Mission Team Trainer and measures that have been developed that are designed specifically to assess domain-specific creative thinking. The Ariel Real Life Problem Solving developed (Author, 2000-2009), for example, provides respondents with the opportunity to utilize domain-specific creative thinking ability in a wide variety of specific real-life situations. For example, in a playground bullying context the students would be asked to generate all the ways that a student could solve the bullying problem in the specific playground context. We plan to build on this work and develop a domain-specific measure of creative thinking in the SWOS MMTT context, e.g., a fluency item is to “identify as many solutions to the tactical problem you experienced in the simulation.” Our initial feasibility study in the SWOS MMTT context indicated Navy interest and support.

This research has been reviewed and approved by my university review board (IRB).

Authors

• Harold F. O'Neil, University of Southern California

• Eunsook Hong, University of Nevada - Las Vegas