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W&L Professor Part Of Team That Received NSF Grant
Dan Johnson, professor of cognitive and behavioral science at Washington and Lee University, is part of a collaborative team that will receive a $2.5 million, fiveyear grant from the National Scie nce Foundation (NSF) to study the effect of creativity in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
Johnson will serve as coprincipal investigator and will work alongside researchers from Georgetown University, the Pennsylvania State University and the University of San Francisco to provide large-scale evidence that creativity is critical to STEM success in college and beyond.
“Creativity is among employers’ most valued skills, and it is critical to the global innovation economy, and yet it is frequently undervalued in U.S. educational institutions,” said Johnson. “It is challenging to reliably and efficiently assess creativity. We have already created and will further develop computational algorithms that automatically assess creativity in transparent and explainable ways. We hope the project will help elevate creativity’s importance across all STEM disciplines and beyond in our educational institutions.”
Johnson’s project has three primary objectives. In the first aim, the research team will investigate how core dimensions of creative cognition (visual, verbal, generative, evaluative) relate to future STEM success in a three-year longitudinal study. The second aim will test computational creativity scoring models and determine which best predicts human creativity ratings as well as which of those computational models best predicts future college and post-college STEM success, parsing the relative contributions of verbal and visual creativity. The third aim will test computational creativity scoring approaches to predict college STEM success, using a large-scale data set of college applicants as a testbed.
Johnson also received a collaborative grant from the NSF in 2022 to fund building a free web platform to automatically compute creativity scores for educators and researchers. The platform is expected to launch publicly within the next few months.
Johnson joined the W&L cognitive and behavioral science faculty in 2009, and he currently serves as the program head for data science.
