About
The Freddie Reisman Center for Translational Research in Creativity and Motivation (FRC) addresses the disconnect between teachers' knowledge of creative and motivated students and teachers' beliefs that affect how they stifle rather than nourish creative students. The medical translational research model, referred to as Bench to Bedside, serves as our prototype for the FRC's model, Lab to Learner.
Background
What most people don’t realize is that much of the world’s best research on creativity and motivation never reaches the people who could use it most. Scholars in publish groundbreaking findings that could transform classrooms, workplaces, and even family life. Sadly, those discoveries often stay tucked away in academic journals or other reports written for other researchers. Teachers, students, parents, and trainers rarely see this work, and even when they do, the language and framing can feel like a foreign code.
The truth is, groundbreaking ideas about how people think, learn, and create often sit on the shelf, waiting for someone else in the research community to pick them up. And while that cycle of scholarly progress is important, it means that years (sometimes decades) can pass before those insights ever make their way into real-world practice.
That’s why the FRC was created. Its founders saw the gap and decided to bridge it. We want to make research come alive for the people who can actually apply it. The FRC’s mission is simple, albeit bold: Close the gap between discovery and impact by translating research on creativity and motivation into meaningful change in classrooms, training programs, and everyday learning.
Services Provided
The FRC seeks out key research from American and international trailblazers in creativity and motivation. We then translate their key findings into language and tools that PreK-12 teachers and higher education faculty (and corporate trainers), their students (and corporate employees), and the students’ families and/or caregivers can immediately understand, along with strategies on implementing creativity and motivation across these audiences. The FRC attempts to develop and share generic templates with examples for translating educational research that can be applied to multiple disciplines.
A team of Drexel University faculty, research students from across multiple disciplines within the University, and select like-minded organizations are in contact with researchers from around the world, collecting the best creativity and motivation research. The research is assessed, and the content is evaluated for inclusion by FRC-trained staff to translate the research for end-user implementation. The FRC’s funding also supports the recruitment of practicing teachers from across the nation who collaborate with the FRC’s leadership in designing authentic, classroom-based lessons that put the translated research into practice with their students. Teacher feedback leads to modifying those lesson plans and pointing out areas of need for future research.
The FRC also provides an assessment template for teachers to evaluate the outcomes of translational research. Center leadership may then instruct teachers and higher education faculty on using the provided evaluation plan as a template for creating their own assessments. The template includes suggested instructional and assessment activities (see the Creativity and Motivation Modules developed from relevant research to implement with their students). A similar process is used with corporate trainers for applying the FRC’s services to their own learners.