The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Creative thinking is among the most sought-after life and work skills in the 21st century. The demand for creativity, however, exceeds the degree to which it is available and developed. The current project aimed to test the effectiveness of a one-year creativity training program for higher education. The creativity of students following the training was measured before, halfway, and after the training. In addition to the within-subjects comparison across time, performance was compared to a matched control group. At each of the measurement points, different versions of seven well-validated creativity tasks (capturing divergent and convergent creative thinking skills) were employed. The creativity training increased students’ ideation skills and, more importantly their cognitive flexibility. However, no difference in originality was observed. Finally, an increase in performance was observed for one of the convergent creativity tasks, the Remote Associate Test. Implications for educational settings and directions for future research are discussed.
From the first wheel to the latest microprocessor creativity has continuously enriched our lives. It plays a vital role in science, innovation, and the arts [
We have moved from an Industrial Age, to a Knowledge Age, to an Innovation Age. Many jobs are disappearing, and new jobs are emerging, for example, due to the transformative impact of digital technologies. On average our future generation of employees will change jobs more than 10 times before they reach the age of 50 [
Evolution has equipped us with a creative mind. However, we often do not use our creative thinking skills to the best of our ability. Some scholars even state that the educational system diminishes our creativity. In the most watched TED talk of all time, educationalist Ken Robinson claims that schools kill creativity—schools do not foster growing into but out of creativity. This is a rather radical view, as schools cultivate the knowledge on which creativity often depends. In schools, children develop the literacy skills necessary for all further learning. Creativity does not happen in a vacuum, it is based on knowledge. However, what schools mostly don’t focus on is teaching and practicing how existing knowledge can be used to come up with creative ideas and problem solutions. In schools that focus on creativity, it is often observed that creativity development is embedded in arts subjects, but not in subjects such as writing and mathematics [
Creativity is a mental phenomenon that results from the application of ordinary cognitive processes such as working memory, and the ability to categorize and manipulate objects (creative cognition approach; [
By now, a variety of reports stress that creative thinking is a crucial 21st century skill [
During recent years notable efforts have been made to empower creativity in education [
We formulated the following hypotheses:
There will be a significant improvement in students’ creative thinking skills from pre-measure to half-way and post-measure in the training group. For exploratory reasons, we will also compare creative performance in the creativity training group between the half-way measure and the post-measure, as this gives an indication whether the time duration of the training has a positive effect on students’ creativity development.
In the control group no difference in creative performance is observed across the three measurement times.
The training group significantly differs in creative performance from the control group on the half-way measure and on the post-measure.
The current study was conducted from September 2017 to May 2018 at an applied university in the Netherlands. The study was pre-registered on open science framework (see
The study employed a pre-post-test between-subject design. Participants were either in the creativity training group or in the control group. Participants’ creative thinking skills were assessed at three time points: at the beginning of the training program (pre-measure; beginning of the academic year, September 2017), after three months of the training (half-way measure; December 2017), and at the end of the training program (post-measure; May 2018). At each testing session, participants’ creative performance was measured by means of seven well-validated and frequently used creativity tasks (for tasks and task description, see the creativity measurement section).
The creativity training program is provided as a mandatory course that counts for 5 ECTS credits. According to Dutch law, 1 credit represents 28 hours of work, and 60 credits represents one year of full-time study. The creativity course (in total 140 hours) lasted two semesters, and the course entailed lectures (i.e., focus on theory) and factory lessons (i.e., focuses on practice exercises in the field of international business).
In the creativity training program, students learned to apply the Six Step Cycle of Creativity to a wide range of problems. The 6 steps—understanding the question, convergent thinking, divergent thinking, detached thinking, stop thinking, and sleeping—are described in more detail below.
Four tools are provided to facilitate walking through the Six Step Cycle: simplify (i.e., reduce the complexity of questions), differentiate (i.e., wonder what is more and less important; what is the big picture what are details), visualize (i.e., use real objects, make sketches, or imagine comparable processes from everyday life) and tag the problem (i.e., link the problem to one of the five senses: sight, smell, sound, taste, touch). Students are repeatedly provided with four different types of assignments, which trigger them to practice the different steps of the Six Step Cycle: The
Each of the training sessions starts with a warming-up: A short video clip that is not aimed at developing creativity, but at making students wonder. The warming-up prepares the mind for the theory and training provided.
Seven creativity tasks were employed to measure students’ divergent thinking, convergent thinking and creative problem solving skills. Creative performance was measured at three time points (pre-measure, half-way measure, post-measure) and, therefore, three versions of each task (except the number task) were used. The task versions were counterbalanced across participants and time points. Importantly, the creativity measures differed from the trained exercises.
The following creativity indices were used to measure the participants’ performance on the AUT: (a)
Students’ age, gender, and educational background were investigated at the pre-measure.
To examine whether the creativity training improved participants’ creative performance, we performed mixed ANOVAs in which treatment (creativity training group, control group) served as the between-subjects factor and measurement time (pre-measure, half-way measure, post-measure) as the within-subjects factor. Results are shown in
For Fluency, there was a significant interaction effect between training and measurement time,
For Flexibility, a significant interaction effect was found between treatment and time,
For Originality, results yielded no significant interaction effect of treatment and time,
For Creativity, the interaction effect between treatment and time was non-significant,
For Usefulness, there was a significant interaction effect between treatment and time,
As in AUT, the training effect was analysed by means of a mixed ANOVA with treatment (creativity training group, control group) as the between-subject variable and measurement time as the within-subjects variable.
For Fluency, the mixed ANOVA showed a significant interaction effect between treatment and time,
For Flexibility, a significance interaction effect was observed between treatment and measurement time,
For Originality, the interaction effect of treatment and measurement time was not significant,
Using a mixed ANOVA, there was a significant interaction effect between treatment and measurement time,
Before data analyses, participants’ familiarity with the tasks were checked. On the pre-measure, 75 participants reported “unfamiliar” with the task; on the half-way measure, 67 participants were unfamiliar with the task; on the post-measure, there were 64 participants who reported “unfamiliar” with the task (see
Pre-measure | Half-way measure | Post-measure | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
Correct | 28 | 24 | 29 | |
Incorrect | 27 | 24 | 16 | |
Correct | 6 | 7 | 9 | |
Incorrect | 14 | 12 | 10 | |
Total | 75 | 67 | 64 |
Given that there were some cells with expected value < 5, Fisher’s exact tests were performed to determine whether there were any differences between and within groups. Results indicated that there was no significant difference between the training and control group on the pre-measure,
Some participants did not complete this task; the performance of 64 participants could be analysed on the selection task. Mixed ANOVAs revealed that there was no interaction effect between treatment and measurement time,
Before data analyses, participants’ familiarity with the insight problems were checked. At pre-measure, 63 participants reported that they were unfamiliar with the problems; at half-way measure, 69 participants reported “unfamiliar”; and at post-measure, 70 participants reported “unfamiliar” (see
Pre-measure | Half-way measure | Post-measure | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
Correct | 5 | 1 | 14 | |
Incorrect | 40 | 48 | 36 | |
Correct | 1 | 1 | 0 | |
Incorrect | 17 | 19 | 20 | |
Total | 63 | 69 | 70 |
Given that there were some cells with expected value < 5, Fisher’s exact tests were performed to determine whether there were any differences between and within groups. We first compared the difference between the training and control group at each measurement time. On the pre-measure, Fisher’s exact test yielded a non-significant result,
On the pre-measure, Fisher’s exact tests revealed no difference between the training and the control group,
Pre-measure | Half-way measure | Post-measure | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
Correct | 21 | 25 | 29 | |
Incorrect | 36 | 11 | 7 | |
Correct | 12 | 5 | 5 | |
Incorrect | 9 | 4 | 4 | |
Total | 78 | 45 | 45 |
Creativity is important for innovation [
The main goal of the current research was to establish whether a creativity-training designed to meet these requirements enhances students’ creative thinking skills. After having followed the creativity-training course provided in the current study, improvements in creativity were observed. On both divergent thinking measures (the verbal AUT, and the visual VIT) students generated significantly more ideas. This effect was already found after three months of training (i.e., on the half-way measure), and did not further increase with duration of training (i.e., on the post-measure). Importantly, the control group showed no change in the number of ideas generated during time.
In addition to looking at ideation skills, the current study also allows to examine the quality of the ideas generated. As mentioned earlier, creative ideas have to be both original and useful [
Besides the significant improvement in creative ideation (i.e., number of ideas generated), the cognitive-oriented training program also significantly enhanced participants’ ability to diversify the categories of the ideas they generated (i.e., cognitive flexibility) [
As the first challenge in moving from creativity to innovation is to recognize whether the available ideas have creative potential, we also examined whether the training has a positive effect on participants’ ability to recognize creative ideas. In the idea selection task, participants had to rank order three business ideas from most to least creative. The training had no effect on participants’ idea selection performance. The training also did not substantially affect participants’ performance on the convergent visual imagination task, the task where they had to re-arrange coins. For the training group, a significant increase in performance was observed from pre-measure to half-way measure, but this difference was not present anymore on the post-measure. A possible explanation for this inconsistent finding could be the way the convergent visual imagination task was administered. No actual coins—which would allow playing with the coins to find a solution—were provided due to practical considerations during the testing session. Instead, the convergent visual imagination task was handed out on paper, and participants had to draw the solution on paper. This slightly changed the essence of the task and, most importantly, formed a misfit with the creativity training program, in which students were used to play and experiment with real objects, hereby making problems tangible as much as possible. Participants’ convergent creativity was further examined by means of the RAT. Participants’ number of correctly solved RAT word pairs prior to training was compared with that following half-way and post-measure training. Compared to the pre-measure, improved performance was observed half-way and post-measure in the creativity training condition, but not in the control condition. The difference in the training condition between half-way and post-measure was not significant, suggesting that RAT performance did not further increase with duration of training.
With regard to creative problem solving skills, no difference was observed between the training and the control condition at the pre-measure, indicating equal creative problem solving skills between both groups at the start of the project. However, at the post-measure, a significant difference in creative problem solving skills was observed between the two groups; in the creativity training group a larger percentage of participants was able to solve the creative problem solving tasks as compared to the control group. Though, when looking at the training group, no difference between pre-measure and post-measure was observed. This indicates that we have to be cautious in drawing any firm conclusions with regard to creative problem solving skills.
The current research project included a between-subjects design with three creativity measurement points: pre-, half- and post-measure. In addition, a control condition has been used. This makes it possible to rule out any practice or learning effects on the creative performance measures. Importantly, the training exercises differed from the tasks that were used to test the effectiveness of the training—participants were therefore not trained to the criterion [
Moreover, an important question for future research is to focus on the optimal duration of the creativity training. The current training was a one-year creativity training, and students’ creative performance was measured prior to, half-way, and after the training. Importantly, whereas a significant increase was observed on ideation skills and on cognitive flexibility from pre- to half-way measure, no further increase was observed from half-way to post-measure, suggesting that creative performance did not increase further with a longer duration of the training. A follow-up study with addition measurement moments during the first months of training can provide insight into the time that is needed to observe a training effect. This question is also interesting in the light of earlier studies showing a creativity training effect after a 2.5 hour of creativity training in both children and adults [
In the current study, mainly Western adults participated. It is important to examine the effectiveness of the current training among Eastern participants and among other age groups, for example, among children and the elderly. Moreover, the domain generality of the training could be further examined. We assume that the training is applicable in various domains; in the current study, however, the effect of the training has been tested on standardized and well-validated creativity tasks, but not in different domains such as science, arts, and product development. Moreover, the standardized and well-validated creativity tasks that were employed in the current study during the pre-, half-way and post-measure were of relatively short nature, participants had a couple of minutes to solve the creativity task (e.g., 3 min for the AUT, and 3 min for the RAT). Time taken to creatively solve a problem is an important component of the Six Step Cycle; specifically, during step 4, 5 and 6 time plays a vital role. For practical reasons, the creativity assessment did not include tasks that needed a longer time to be solved. In a follow up study it would be interesting to more extensively test whether students’ ability to apply step 4, 5 and 6 of the Six Step Cycle increased from the pre-measure to the half-way and post-measure. Finally, no conclusions can be drawn about the long-term effects of the training. In the current study three measurement moments have been employed, but no follow-up data are available. In future research a follow-up measurement, for example 6 months after the training, could be administered to obtain information about potential long-term effects of the creativity training.
Future generations will need to think creatively in order to thrive in our fast-changing world. This brings attention to the need to foster creativity. Education plays a central role in fostering creativity—not merely in elites, but in all learners. While the world has undergone revolutionary changes, teaching practices have not changed much: learning continues to focus primarily on rote learning, instead of stimulating creativity. The current findings demonstrate the effectiveness of a one-year training program in fostering creative thinking skills in applied university students. The current findings suggest that by spending some curriculum time on creativity development, we can contribute to preparing learners for a rapidly changing world after graduation.
We would like to thank Marianne Pütz and Olga Boon for their help with data collection.