Creative quality matters: Teaching early-career scientists to think in multiple directions

Divergent thinking (DT) is an essential cognitive ability to nurture creativity and is often used as an indicator of creative potential. This study examined early-career scientists’ ability to generate ideas in multiple directions during a 10-week creativity course. Three alternate-form exercises of two formats (“Many uses” and “What is”) – conducted at the beginning, middle, and end of the course – were used to assess DT evolution of biology PhD students (n = 21). Responses to these exercises were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively using traditional DT scores, and theory-driven dimensions representing the ideational hyperspace. Results showed that PhD students’ fluency, originality, and peak originality greatly increased from Exercise 1 to Exercise 2, however, in Exercise 3, which involved the “What is” task, growth was not statistically significant in any of the three DT scores. Although overall fluency increased, correlations with originality and peak originality became weaker as the course advanced and not significant in the last exercise. The ideational hyperspace analysis revealed that PhD students generated ideas mostly on six conceptual categories: Practical, Serious, Non-Synthetic, NEMBL, Feasible, and Domain-General; five of which had been negatively correlated with originality. Findings suggested that DT should be supported with the practice of cognitive flexibility and deliberately thinking about specific cognitive processes to improve early-career scientists’ ability to generate both more and highly original ideas. Considerations for teaching creativity to scientists are discussed.