Does Design Thinking Training Really Increase Creativity? Results from an Experiment with Middle-School Students

Abstract

Design thinking remains mired in controversy. Its proponents claim that it enhances not just confidence but also creativity, but its opponents question whether it does anything beyond building unfounded confidence. In order to bring rigorous evidence to this debate, we designed a randomized experiment amongst school children served by a major non-governmental organization in rural India. A well-established design thinking intervention for school children comprised the treatment, and the organization’s existing science-based intervention for hands-on learning served as the control condition. The findings reveal that the design thinking training did not just increase confidence: it also significantly increased ideational fluency and elaboration in a divergent thinking task, although the originality and flexibility of the generated ideas was on average lower in the treatment group than the control group. The intervention had no effect on perspective taking or risk aversion. We also find that the increase in confidence occurred primarily among female students, whereas the increase in ideational fluency and elaboration occurred for both genders.