P-14 Exploring Student Perceptions of Creativity & Innovation: Developing a Survey of Students

Creativity and innovation are popular topics on college campuses and are becoming sought after traits in today’s rapidly developing society (Garcia). It appears that opportunities to cultivate skills in creativity and innovation in higher education will soon become a necessity in order to meet these emerging demands. Yet, from our preliminary research, we have found no Seventh-day Adventist college or university that currently has, or is developing any type of intentional innovation space or significant programs aimed at innovation, except for one—Andrews University. In order to develop relevant programming students’ perspective must be understood. The purpose of this study is to better understand the current thoughts and attitudes of current students towards creativity and innovation. The research question is, How do undergraduate students at Andrews University think about innovation and creativity? Do they see it as important or useful? In what ways would they envision Andrews University supporting their growth in this area? Using a concept map of the construct to be studied, the authors developed and piloted a survey and will report their initial results and improvements to the survey instrument