Influence of prior knowledge on students’ performance in idea generation: Reflection on university entry requirements

CONTEXT: Creative performance of science and engineering professionals is supported by their ability to generate diverse solution ideas. The latter ability, in turn, can be influenced by numerous factors including prior knowledge and experien ce of the problem solver as well as by ideation heuristics she/he uses. This paper investigates the influence of prior science knowledge on the outcomes of an idea generation experiment that engaged engineering students from Australia, Czech Republic, Finl and and Russian Federation in resolving the same open -ended technical problem. PURPOSE: The outcomes of the abovementioned idea generation experiment were unexpected. Australian students proposed statistically significantly less distinct ideas than their international counterparts. Moreover, the ideas generated by the Australian students were not as broad as ideas generated by the students from the other three countries. Such poor performance of Australian students contradicted the results of the 2012 OECD PISA assessment of creative problem solving skills , which positioned Australian 15 -year -olds above their international peers from Czech Republic and Russian Federation and on a par with students from Finland . The reasons for such a poor performance by Aust ralian students required exploration . APPROACH: In order to establish the potential reasons behind the unexpectedly poor performance of Australian students this study.