Creative thinking is among the most sought-after life and work skills in the 21 st 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.

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Empirical studies of creativity emphasize the importance of ambiguity advantage in idea generation and creative problem‐solving. This study examined whether ambiguous figures could directly induce a mind‐set that would transfer to the creative problem‐solving. In Experiment 1, we examined whether presentation of ambiguous figures would influence participants' performance in alternative uses tasks, and the results showed that prior exposure to ambiguous figures significantly enhanced participants' performance in the dimension of fluency, flexibility, and originality than those exposed to non‐ambiguous figures; in general uses tasks, there were no significant difference in the reaction time and originality between the ambiguous figure condition and non‐ambiguous figure condition. In Experiment 2, the facilitative effect of ambiguous figures on creative thinking was further examined with creative story generation tasks that demand more mental effort and increased cognitive load. Results showed that creativity of stories generated in ambiguous figure condition was scored significantly higher than those in non‐ambiguous figure condition. The current research extends our understanding of the facilitative effect of ambiguous figures on creative problem‐solving.

Creative thinking is needed to thrive in our fast‐changing world. It has been shown that creative thinking skills can be enhanced through training. Whereas previous research has mainly focused on examining the overall effectiveness of comprehensive creativity training programs, this study examined the effectiveness of four cognitive‐based training techniques (SCAMPER, random connection, schema violation, and simple ideation), each with the aim of training specific cognitive processes underlying creativity. The effectiveness of the four techniques was tested using a pre–posttest between‐subjects design. The participants were assigned to one of the four creativity training conditions or a control condition and practiced each training technique for approximately 20 min. Before and after training, the participants’ creative performance was measured with divergent thinking (Alternative Uses Task; fluency, flexibility, originality, creativity, usefulness) and convergent thinking (Remote Associates Test) tasks. The results showed marginal to significant improvements on several key indicators of divergent thinking, but none of the techniques led to improvement in convergent thinking. Specifically, the SCAMPER technique targeting conceptual expansion marginally improved idea originality, while the random connection technique targeting conceptual combination and the schema violation technique targeting cognitive flexibility seemed to facilitate idea fluency and idea flexibility. No improvement was observed for the simple ideation technique and the control condition.