BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Educ.
Sec. STEM Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1637218
Understanding Scientific Creativity: An Exploratory Creativity Scale for Organic Chemistry
Provisionally accepted
- 1Duke University, Durham, United States
- 2Sheridan College, Oakville, Canada
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Creativity is pivotal for innovation across various domains, including science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The present study explores domain-specific creativity in organic chemistry by introducing the Divergent Skeletal Formula Task (DSFT) as a novel measure.The DSFT requires participants to generate constitutional isomers of a given molecular formula, providing an objective quantification of creativity based on the rarity and originality of responses.We investigated the correlations between DSFT performance and established creativity indices-the Alternate Uses Task (AUT) and the Divergent Association Task (DAT)-while controlling for age, gender, and fluid intelligence through partial correlation analyses. The results revealed that correlations between DSFT performance and both AUT Creativity and DAT scores were not statistically significant. However, there was a significant positive correlation between DSFT performance and AUT Flexibility, suggesting that cognitive flexibility is a critical component of creativity in chemistry, even when statistically accounting for age, gender, and fluid intelligence. This finding supports the idea of domain-generality in creativity, indicating that cognitive processes underlying general creative thinking, particularly flexibility, are applicable to specific STEM domains like organic chemistry. Thus, insights from studies on general creativity may be valuable for understanding and fostering creativity in specialized fields, offering practical implications for educational and research settings.
Keywords: creativity, stem, Chemistry, Domain-specificity and generality, divergent thinking
Received: 28 May 2025; Accepted: 03 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Blue, Barr, Ma, He, Seli and Cox Jr.. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Charles T. Cox Jr., Duke University, Durham, United States
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