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Research
Current Projects
The LRI Student Success Project: The LRI Student Success Project is a longitudinal examination of individual characteristics related to academic outcomes including classroom performance, choice of major, and retention. The project was developed in 2003 by Drs. James Kaufman and Mark Agars, and research began in 2004 when the LRI was awarded a $90,000 grant jointly sponsored by CSUSB President Al Karnig, Provost Lou Fernandez, and Dean John Conley. Data collection is now in its 4th year and remains underway through sponsorship through the LRI and the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. More on the Student Success Project…
Creativity & Fairness: Creativity can be an outstanding supplement to increase the fairness of current intellectual and achievement assessments. A central tenet of nonbiased assessment is that the correct constructs are being measured. If the goal is to assess intellectual ability, then any measure that adds to our knowledge of a person’s intellectual ability helps reduce any possible bias in the testing process. For example, some researchers have proposed that differences on some IQ and achievement tests which involve remembering the details of a story may show larger African American-Caucasian differences in part because the two ethnicities approach the task differently. This theory argues that Caucasians approach the task as the test-makers intended – by trying to memorize as many appropriate details as possible and stick to the presented story; in contrast, African Americans may put more emphasis on telling the story creatively. Supplementing these types of IQ and achievement tests with measures of creativity can help provide additional information about a person’s abilities. Recent and ongoing LRI work has examined creative abilities across ethnicity, gender, and culture. Much of this research (e.g., Baer & Kaufman, in press; Kaufman, 2006; Kaufman & Sternberg, 2005; Kaufman, Baer, Gentile, 2004) has shown few significant differences, or none at all, by gender or ethnicity. All groups of people seem to have the same capacity to be creative. Current research is exploring possible bias in rating creativity and the possible influence of stereotype threat on creative performance.
Creativity, Motivation, and High School Performance: This project, led by CSUSB student Ryan Holt, is an investigation into the relationship between self-assessed creativity across different areas (such as visual arts and interpersonally), self-assessed intelligence, intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, and self-reported high school grades in different subjects. Nearly all studies of creativity and motivation or intelligence tend to assume creativity is one thing (i.e., being a creative person). This study aims to study these questions from a domain-specific perspective (i.e., someone who considers herself creative in math may not also consider herself creative in writing).
LRI Research Reports
Brief reports are submitted for every major project and paper conducted through the LRI. The most recent are listed below. A full list of reports is available here…
Publications
A complete list of publications based on LRI sponsored projects or written by LRI-affiliated faculty is available here…
Student Research
Active student involvement LRI projects is central to our mission. To learn more about our student researchers and the work they have done, or to find out how you might become a LRI-affiliated Student Researcher, go to our Student Research page…
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