The effectiveness of the teaching program 'scientific creativity in practice'

Abstract This study examines the impact of the Scientific Creativity in Practice program on students’ scientific creativity. This comprehensive teaching program aims to foster general creative skills, domain-specific competencies, and certain personality traits in science education. The program includes a variety of interventions and reflection tools that focus on divergent thinking, problem-solving, bisociation, imagination, and metacognition, which promotes strategies for developing, selecting, and evaluating creative solutions to scientific problems. The study used a two-group, repeated-measures design in Austrian secondary schools, with 26 classes taught using teaching techniques from the program and 12 control classes using traditional teaching methods. The effectiveness of the teaching program was assessed using the Divergent Problem-Solving Ability test, which was administered at the beginning and end of the school year. The results showed that the intervention classes achieved significantly higher scores, indicating improved divergent problem-solving ability.The study also emphasized the importance of intervention fidelity, with the quality of implementation (adherence) having a significantly higher impact on outcomes than the quantity (number of interventions). The results confirm the effectiveness of the Scientific Creativity in Practice program in fostering academic creativity and emphasize the importance of a well-structured teaching program. Future research will focus on measuring the impact of individual techniques of the program on different aspects of scientific creativity.