Enhancement of Creative Thinking Skills Using a Cognitive-Based Creativity Training

Abstract

Creative thinking skills can be considered one of the key competencies for the twenty-first century—they allow us to remain flexible and provide us with the capacity to deal with the opportunities and challenges that are part of our complex and fast-changing world. The increased focus on innovation combined with recent reports of decrements in creative performance brings attention to the need to develop creative thinking skills at both the educational and business levels. The main objective of the current project was to develop and scientifically test a brief, domain-unspecific creativity training. Undergraduate university students (N = 32) participated in the creativity training, which was a single session of 1.5 h and employed a cognitive approach (i.e., participants were shown how to apply creative thinking techniques in a systematic fashion). The effectiveness of the training was tested by means of a pre- and post-training comparison employing creativity measures that relied on divergent thinking, convergent thinking, and creative problem solving skills. To control for a possible instrumentation threat, two versions of each task were created and counterbalanced between the pre- and post-measure across participants. Following the creativity training, improvements were observed across a variety of creative performance measures. Importantly, the creativity level of the ideas generated during the divergent thinking task improved post-training. Moreover, the findings of the current study shed light on a possible underlying mechanism for these improvements in creativity, that is, cognitive flexibility. In addition to these divergent thinking skills, the training also improved convergent thinking and produced marginal improvements in creative problem solving skills. The current findings have important implications for educational and organizational settings, as they suggest that this brief creativity training (or one employing similar cognitive techniques) could be implemented to facilitate creative thinking skills.