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Research Initiation Grants: Nurturing the Creativity of Students with ADHD in Engineering Disciplines
The IRB approved Consent Form for Participation in a Research Study can be dowloaded here.
Principal Investigator: Dr. Arash Esmaili Zaghi
Study Title: Nurturing the Creativity of Students with ADHD in Engineering Disciplines
Sponsor: National Science Foundation, Directorate of Research in Engineering Education
Introduction
You are invited to participate in a research study to investigate if engineering students with ADHD characteristics are more creative and risk taker than their peers without ADHD characteristics. This study may lay groundwork for developing engineering education programs that may better nurture the creativity of engineering students with ADHD. This study is being funded by the Directorate of Research in Engineering Education of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
You are being asked to participate because you are an undergraduate student enrolled in the School of Engineering.
Why is this study being done?
We are conducting this research study to learn more about the experiences of students with ADHD characteristics in the School of Engineering. Some studies have shown that there are very few students receiving services for ADHD in engineering programs, thus these findings raise the question of why students with ADHD are not pursuing engineering studies. The proposed project will specifically investigate this phenomenon and will gather information about the perceptions on engineering program from students with ADHD characteristics in the engineering college.
We suggest that recruiting and retaining students with ADHD characteristics in engineering programs is a significant problem in engineering education, and may result in the loss of creative and innovative individuals. As such, this proposed project will attempt to gather information to help address this problem and will present a significant and important potential addition to the existing body of knowledge.
What are the study procedures? What will I be asked to do?
For this study, we intend to recruit two groups engineering students. The first group, called Study Group, will include 10-15 students who possess strong ADHD characteristics. The second group, called Control Group, comprises of up to 75 students who do not possess ADHD characteristics. Then we will ask students of each group participate in a series of assessments and surveys. The data we collect will help us assess if there is a considerable difference between the “thinking outside the box” and “risk taking” potential of these two groups. How we find candidate students for the Study Group and Control Group is explained below.
If you agree to take part in this study, we will first ask you if you have ever been diagnosed with ADHD, and if so, we will ask you if you are currently taking any medications for your ADHD.
Then we will ask you to complete the Brown ADD Rating Scales assessment during a time that works for you and one of the principal investigators (the test will take less than an hour). The Brown ADD Scales help to assess a wide range of symptoms of executive function impairments associated with ADHD/ADD. Administering this assessment is not for diagnostic purposes, rather, to determine if you possess ADD/ADHD traits or characteristics. After your Brown ADD Scales assessment is scored, a generated standard report will be emailed to you. The report will be de-indentified, password protected, and encrypted such that only you can open the report. Your test scores will only be viewed by the Principal Investigators of the project for the research purposes. We will not share your test results with any other individual.
If your test scores are considerably higher than the normative values, and/or you self-disclosed that you have been formerly diagnosed with ADHD by a professional, you will be invited by email to participate in the Study Group.
If your score shows that you may possess ADHD characteristics or traits and you have not been previously diagnosed for ADHD, an information packet containing information about ADHD, as well as academic resources on campus will be provided to you and you will be encouraged to follow-up with your doctor or a professional practitioner for a full diagnostic evaluation.
If your test scores are lower than the normative values, you will be invited by email to participate in the Control Group.
If you wish to continue to participate in the study, you will be asked to take the Torrance Test of Creativity (approximately one hour) and complete a two-part creativity self-rating scales (approximately one hour). In addition, you will be asked to complete a questionnaire on academic experiences in college (approximately one hour). Only if you are in the Study Group, you will be asked to participate in two semi-structured interviews (each approximately one hour). The interview questions will focus on your educational experiences, your difficulties in the college because of your ADHD characteristics, and your creativity.
Administration of the assessments and interviews will take place in a private office in the engineering complex on the Storrs campus at the University of Connecticut. Two one-hour periods will be scheduled for the Brown ADD Scales and the Torrance Test of Creativity. An additional two one-hour periods will be scheduled with you to complete the creativity self-report rating scales and the academic experience questionnaire. If you are in the “Study Group,” you will be asked to participate in two, one-hour semi-structured private interviews and will be audio recorded. We audio record the interviews to be able to transcribe them. The audio recordings will be permanently destroyed after they are transcribed. The procedure to protect your confidential information and your identity is explained later.
No graduate students will be involved in this study and all the interviews and tests will be administered directly by the Principal Investigators of this research project.
After we analyze and aggregate the data, we will send you an email and ask you if you are interested to learn about our preliminary findings, which you can disregard or can meet with one of the Principal Investigators. We will discuss our preliminary findings with you and invite you to provide your feedback, if any. At the end of the project, we will email you the reports and articles. Your name, your personal information, and any information that can be used to identify that you have had participated in this study will never be published.
For this study, we are also asking permission to access your academic records only for research purposes. We need your academic transcripts to study if there is a difference in the grades for engineering students with ADHD characteristics, as compared with engineering students without the characteristics. If you grant the permission, we will ask the office of the registrar at UConn to provide the PIs with your transcripts during your time at UConn.
What are the risks or inconveniences of the study?
We believe there are no known risks associated with this research study; however, a possible inconvenience may be the time it takes to complete the study.
If you possess ADHD characteristics, you may have faced some difficulties at school. These experiences may make you uncomfortable or anxious during the interviews, but you are free not to answer any question that you do not wish to answer.
What are the benefits of the study?
You may not directly benefit from this research; however, we hope that your participation in the study may help us add to the knowledge that may improve engineering education, in general, and for students with different learning types, in particular. We hope to learn more about the experiences of students with ADHD characteristics in our traditional engineering programs, and listen to their ideas and feedback on how to improve their educational experience.
Will I receive payment for participation? Are there costs to participate?
There are no costs to you. You will not be paid to be in this study; however, to compensate for the time you if you participate in the study or control groups, you will be offered to enroll in a one-credit 4000-level engineering Independent Study course, titled Creativity in Engineering. You will receive one credit when you complete the study tasks, which are discussed earlier.
At any point during the study, if you decide to withdraw from the study or if you decide not to continue for any reason, you will be removed from the course without any record in your transcript. Receiving the additional one credit may help you work towards accumulating enough credits to graduate. Being enrolled in the independent study course will not require any additional time or effort from you beyond the time you are volunteering to participate in the study. There will be no lecture, term project, or any other activities for this course.
How will my personal information be protected?
Any information that is obtained in connection with this study and that can be identified with you will remain strictly confidential and will be disclosed only with your
Any information that is obtained in connection with this study and that can be identified with you will remain strictly confidential and will be disclosed only with your permission or as required by law. To protect the privacy of the participants, we will not let the other participant know that you are involved in this research and will not let you know who else is participating. All the assessments and interviews will be administrated privately.
The following procedures will be used to protect the confidentiality of your data and your identity. The Principal Investigators will remove your identities from the records such as test data, transcripts, questionnaire and the transcribed interviews. The de-identified records will be archived as separate password protected PDF files. Each individual file will be labeled with a randomly generated seven-digit code. A master key that links your identities and the seven-digit codes will be maintained in a separate computer so that your record cannot be re-identified. The master key will be permanently destroyed after five years. All other electronic files (e.g. database, spreadsheet, etc.) will be password protected. Any computer hosting such files will be equipped with updated antivirus and security protection software. Only the Principal Investigators will know these passwords. As the National Science Foundation (NSF) funds this project, data that we collect may be shared with other researchers in the future, but only after your name and all other identifying information have been removed.
At the conclusion of this study, the researchers may publish their findings with no indication of the participant names. Information will be presented in aggregated and summary format and you cannot be identified in any publications or presentations.
We will do our best to protect the confidentiality of the information we gather from you but we cannot guarantee 100% confidentiality. You should also know that the UConn Institutional Review Board (IRB) and Research Compliance Services may inspect the study records as part of its auditing program, but these reviews will only focus on the researchers and not on your responses or involvement. The IRB is a group of people who review research studies to protect the rights and welfare of research participants.
Can I stop being in the study and what are my rights?
You do not have to be in this study if you do not want to. If you agree to be in the study, but later change your mind, you may drop out at any time. There are no penalties or consequences of any kind if you decide that you do not want to participate. Additionally, you do not have to answer any question that you do not want to answer. However, for the success of the study, your commitment to this study is encouraged.
Whom do I contact if I have questions about the study?
TTake as long as you like before you make a decision. We will be happy to answer any question you have about this study. If you have further questions about this study or if you have a research-related problem, you may contact the principal investigator, (Dr. Arash Esmaili Zaghi, zaghi@engr.uconn.edu, (860) 486-2468). If you have any questions concerning your rights as a research participant, you may contact the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the University of Connecticut at (860) 486-8802.