Effects of divergent thinking training on students’ scientific creativity: The impact of individual creative potential and domain knowledge

By Meng Sun, Minhong Wang, Rupert Wegerif. 2020

119 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Training on creative thinking, in particular divergent thinking has shown promising effects on improving creativity in higher education and organizational contexts. It’s unclear how school students’ scientific creativity can be enhanced through effective training and how individual differences might influence the training effects. This study examined the effects of a divergent thinking training program, which helped high school students to master a set of divergent thinking strategies and apply them in scientific creativity-related tasks. The results showed that students’ scientific creativity performance was improved after training. Moreover, students with either a high or low level of creative potential equally benefited from the training, whereas students with a higher level of domain knowledge profited more from the training than those with a lower level of domain knowledge. The interaction between training effects and domain knowledge implied the need for aligning the acquisition of domain knowledge with the training on divergent thinking for effective development of scientific creativity. Our results suggest that teaching domain knowledge and teaching domain general skills should not be opposed but work best when integrated together.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3a5ef97df138356f18cca3173336f00e4cade305