Engaging learners in the excitement of science, helping them discover the value of evidencebased reasoning and higher-order cognitive skills, and teaching them to become creative problem
solvers have long been goals of science education reformers. But the means to achieve these
goals, especially methods to promote creative thinking in scientific problem solving, have not
become widely known or used. In this essay, I review the evidence that creativity is not a single
hard-to-measure property. The creative process can be explained by reference to increasingly
well-understood cognitive skills such as cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control that are
widely distributed in the population. I explore the relationship between creativity and the
higher-order cognitive skills, review assessment methods, and describe several instructional
strategies for enhancing creative problem solving in the college classroom. Evidence suggests
that instruction to support the development of creativity requires inquiry-based teaching that
includes explicit strategies to promote cognitive flexibility. Students need to be repeatedly
reminded and shown how to be creative, to integrate material across subject areas, to
question their own assumptions, and to imagine other viewpoints and possibilities. Further
research is required to determine whether college students’ learning will be enhanced by
these measures