Developing Students’ Creative Self-Efficacy Based on Design-Thinking: Evaluation of an Elective University Course

The development of novel and useful ideas is a process that can be described in multiple steps, including information gathering, generating ideas and evaluating ideas. We evaluated a university course that was developed based on design thinking principles which employ similar steps. Our results show that the course was not effective in enhancing students' creative self-efficacy, the belief that they are able to generate novel and useful ideas. Comparison to previous training approaches lead to conclusions on how to improve the course, and to implications for future research.