Teaching chemistry as a creative subject

Abstract

Chemistry is a creative field focused on exploring new possibilities. However, students rarely look at chemistry as a creative discipline. Therefore, it may be worthwhile to reconsider the way chemistry is taught to younger generations. In this Perspective Paper, creativity as a learning goal is explored and related to goals communicated in chemistry education research. A connection is made to related engineering STEM fields in which the call for creativity has been recognized more than in chemistry education. As in other fields, creative chemists stand out in alternating between creative – and critical thinking, coupled with their field specific knowledge and skills. These skills do not develop in tandem. Probably, it is often not possible, or wise, to address all three goals at the same moment. Assignments that steer to making comparisions are likely to initiatie critical thinking first, assignments aimed at proposing new solutions stimulate creative thinking first. Students' awareness of creative options in their assignments affects their creative learning experience. The mindset students have developed on how science – and their science assessments – should look like could influence their critical – and creative thinking. The creative learning possibilities educators offer, the way they build up their assignments and how they communicate explicitly and implicitly on goals and expectations, could be the key to stimulate chemistry students’ creativity.

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Introduction

The field of chemistry has been developed and is still developing due to the ability of scientists to capture their imagination of an imperceptible molecular world and translate that into testable predictions. However, increasingly detailed information that emerges in this way does not provide a priori answers to new chemical challenges. Complexity and subtlety of chemical changes imply that chemists cannot only count on their accumulated knowledge, analytical skills, models, or nowadays, artificial intelligence. Chemistry is for a large part about exploring new possibilities and choices to be considered followed by relevant tests. In this way, chemistry can be considered a creative process.

Unfortunately, students do not often recognize chemistry and other natural sciences as creative subjects. (Lederman et al., 2002; van Griethuijsen et al., 2015; Kim et al., 2019). This is remarkable, as the creative nature of natural sciences, and that of chemistry in particular, offer many opportunities to stimulate students' creativity (Freire et al., 2019). Therefore, it may be worthwhile to reconsider the way educators present and teach the subject of chemistry to younger generations of students. Furthermore, analytical – and creative thinking are considered the most important skills for employees in today's and tomorrow's world (WEF, 2023). Since the majority of students will pursue careers in other fields than chemistry, this approach could be generally beneficial.

In Engineering Education the call for creativity most likely has been more pronounced than in chemistry education, which resulted in more educational research and the development of specific ideas concerning teaching on creativity in these related STEM fields (Morin et al., 2018; Aguilera and Ortiz-Revilla, 2021; Tekmen-Araci, 2024). However, also in engineering education ambitions to implement creative learning opportunities and education practice do not always correspond. This is felt as a missed opportunity by students, educators and employers (Cropley, 2015). That faculties sometimes fail to include creativity in engineering programs has been linked to that engineering faculties and other stakeholders do not understand creativity and innovation sufficiently well to do anything to change the system, even if they are motivated to do so (Cropley, 2015). Perhaps this applies to chemistry education as well. I suppose that ingrained habits are in use that hamper students' creativity, while at the same time much chemistry educational practice exists that fosters creativity but has not been linked to it in educational research. However, the positive effects of creativity in education on students' motivation, learning, and well-being are well-known from various educational studies (Cropley, 2012; Davies et al., 2013; Martínez et al., 2021). Additionally, the development of critical and creative thinkers has been identified as the foremost challenge by the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL, 2024). This raises questions about how creativity can be more prominently addressed in chemistry teaching and is the motivation for writing this Perspective Paper.

Relation between creativity, creative thinking and critical thinking

Creativity is linked to the creation of novelty. Creativity needs creative thinking, but creativity and creative thinking do not mean the same thing, as for creativity more is needed than creative thinking. Creative thinking is seen as divergent thinking and is often schematically depicted as a divergent light beam (Guilford, 1967; Cropley, 2006). During creative thinking one broadens one's horizon and one could come up with new, original, unexpected or unusual ideas. Critical thinking is seen as the opposite route to divergent thinking and is often depicted with a convergent light beam (Cropley, 2006). During convergent thinking, analytically analysing available information converges to a solution of a well-defined problem. Convergent thinking has been linked to people's knowledge, skills and experience, whereas divergent thinking is linked to flexibility (finding ideas in different categories), fluency (number of ideas) and originality (unique or unusual ideas) (Guilford, 1967).

Even though, creative – and critical thinking are distinguished as divergent – and convergent thinking, there is now a wide acceptance that for creativity to happen convergent and divergent thinking are of equal importance and are occurring in cyclic phases within a creative process (Cropley, 2006; Goldschmidt, 2016; Zhu et al., 2019).

From somewhat older literature in the field of architecture and design it can be deduced, that at a certain point, one found it necessary to conclude that the importance of convergent thinking for creativity had rather been underestimated for creative processes. This view has been illustratively written down by AJ Cropley as “Free production of variability through unfettered divergent thinking holds out the seductive promise of effortless creativity but runs the risk of generating only quasi-creativity or pseudo-creativity if it is not adapted to reality. Therefore, creativity seems to involve 2 components: generation of novelty (via divergent thinking) and evaluation of the novelty (via convergent thinking). In the area of convergent thinking, knowledge is of particular importance: It is a source of ideas, suggests pathways to solutions, and provides criteria of effectiveness and novelty. The way in which the 2 kinds of thinking work together can be understood in terms of thinking styles or of phases in the generation of creative products.” (Cropley, 2006). Shifts between divergent and convergent thinking have also been coupled to defocused and focused attention responses to stimuli. Focused attention is paid to what is already there, defocused attention allows attention to wander, to imagine what is not yet there, what maybe possible (Gabora, 2010; Goldschmidt, 2016).

When it comes to dividing students’ focus over convergent – and divergent thinking, the opposite might have been the case in chemistry education. Maybe we failed to show the inherently creative character of chemistry to students, because the importance of divergent thinking has been underestimated and underexposed in chemistry education.

Assessment of creative and – critical thinking

Even though creativity needs both creative and critical thinking, they are often assessed as separate skills on capabilities tests. For example, in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which compares the skills and knowledge of 15-year-olds across 95 countries, critical thinking and creative thinking skills are evaluated through different tests.

The natural science PISA-test focuses on assessing students' critical thinking in science. It evaluates their scientific knowledge, understanding of how it is obtained, and the level of evidence supporting it (OECD, 2019). The PISA creativity assessments, first implemented in 2022, evaluate students' ability to generate diverse and original ideas through multiple responses. The test covers written expression, social problem solving, visual expression, and scientific problem solving (OECD, 2023).

Skill thresholds. A comparison of the 2022 PISA results between creativity tests and tests in mathematics, science, and reading reveals that high academic performance in mathematics and reading is not necessary for success in creative thinking. However, a minimum of proficiency in mathematics and reading required to excel in the creative thinking test. Top students in math were not necessarily top creative thinkers, and top creative thinkers were also not necessarily top students in math. However, students that were either low performing in math or creative thinking were virtually never excelling in the other (OECD, 2024).

In line with these finding on PISA's large datasets, various studies have also concluded that creative thinking skills alone, without a sufficient level of domain-specific convergent thinking skills, do not result in creativity outcomes (Webb et al., 2017; Zhu et al., 2019; Zainuddin et al., 2020; de Vink et al., 2022). Conversely, the extent to which domain-specific convergent thinking skills, in the absence of creative thinking skills, can produce creative outcomes may not have been explored thus far. Viewing creativity as alternating between convergent and divergent thinking suggests that in every subject, creativity could be limited by either underdeveloped critical – or creative thinking skills.

This supports the idea that both convergent and divergent thinking, along with essential practical and knowledge skills, can (or should) be specifically trained in each educational field.

Level of creativity

A definition for the level of creativity has been presented as Creativity = Originality × Appropriateness (Simonton, 2012). In this definition creativity is seen as the product of that what results from Divergent thinking (Orginality) and that what results from Convergent thinking (Appropriateness, which could also be read as Correctness in a scientific context). When either the level of Originality (creative/divergent thinking) or Appropriateness (critical/convergent thinking) approaches zero, the creativity level also approaches zero. On the other hand, high levels of critical – and creative thinking both lift the level of creativity, as long as there is a certain threshold level of the other. To encourage creativity in chemistry classes, we thus need to teach knowledge and skills, while trying to stimulate both critical – and creative thinking within student groups.

In order to understand how to do this, we should look for the keys to evoke critical – and creative thinking.

Creativity as a learning goal

‘’To create’’ is placed at the top of the learning pyramid of Bloom (Anderson et al., 2000) and is described as coming up with new or original work. In terms of 21st-century skills, creativity has been defined with three main learning objectives, i.e. to think creatively, work creatively with others and to implement creative innovations (Trilling et al., 2009). These have been illustrated as follows:

Thinking creatively is characterized by the use of a wide range of techniques to create new ideas (such as brainstorming) and to elaborate, refine, analyse and evaluate in order to improve and maximize creative efforts.

Working creatively with others is characterized by effective communication of new ideas and an open and responsive view on new and diverse perspectives. Creative input and feedback of a group is incorporated into the result of the creative process.

Implementing creative innovations means making a useful contribution to a field by realizing creative ideas into products an thus ensuring further development. In a creative process one views failure as an opportunity to learn and one understands that creativity and innovation is a long-term, cyclic process of small successes and frequent mistakes.

Despite the general acknowledgement of the importance of creativity for education, content analysis of the curricula of a set of twelve countries (Asian, Oceanite and European) showed that even when the importance of creativity is emphasized in the school curriculum, creativity is often not defined and not much support is given to teachers to teach creativity in practice in different educational fields (Patston et al., 2021), which indicates that there might be a general gap between the ambitions of educational policy and how educational practice is supported.

Nature of science

One of the key features of the nature of science is that curiosity and creativity play an important propulsive role (Rees and Newton, 2020). In science education, practical investigations provide students with the opportunity to explore and develop scientific reasoning skills. These activities offer numerous opportunities for creative learning and innovative experiences.

However, traditional practical chemistry education often use a recipe style. As these instructions appear to have students more focussed on completing steps correctly than on understanding or exploring, these have been criticized for having a limited learning effect (Hofstein and Lunetta, 2004; Rees and Newton, 2020).

In response to this many educational activities and projects have been developed to provide students with opportunities to gain experience how science works, interpret data, and examine arguments involving uncertainties. These activities generally fall under the umbrella of Inquiry Based Learning (IBL), a key theme in science curricula worldwide (Gericke et al., 2023). Three main purposes to do IBL activities are: learning about science, – learning to do science and Addressing Socio Scientific Issues (SSIs) (Gericke et al., 2023).

However, systematic reviews on Inquiry-Based Chemistry Education (Jegstad, 2024) and Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) (Rodriguez et al., 2020) showed that chemistry education research often focuses on how an activity influences students’ understanding of specific chemistry concepts. For this, typically traditional topics such as electrochemistry, acids and bases, stoichiometry, particulate nature of matter have frequently been addressed (Jegstad, 2024). Also in the portfolio of chemistry teachers the primary learning objective with IBL activities is often related to the acquisition of specific chemical content knowledge (Breslyn and McGinnis, 2012). In addition there is research addressing how learning chemistry in a context rich environment affects students view on – or motivation for – chemistry (Jegstad, 2024).

For biology teachers the focus with IBL is more often on formulating research questions, hypothesis, and designing a controlled experimental set-up, whereas physics teachers focus on modelling data and generating mathematical expressions to describe physical phenomena (Breslyn and McGinnis, 2012).

These general goals recognized in IBL activities in chemistry, biology and physics do not necessarily make a strong appeal on students’ creativity and may even have elements that hinder students creativity, for example when too strict directions are given on how results should look like, what knowledge should be learned from observations, or how experiments should be conducted. The teaching of a ‘scientific method’ itself has also been regarded as teaching a myth or misconception, or at best a naïve view on the nature of science (Lederman et al., 2002; Reiff-Cox, 2020). In addition, presenting the Nature of Science as a rationale and orderly process that makes knowledge appear, might not only underexpose the central propulsive role of creativity for those people working in science, it might also not be a very appealing or interesting perspective of science for young students.

Perspectives on creativity in educational practice

In alignment with limited effort to define and support creativity in curricula (Patston et al., 2021), students in chemistry classes rarely view the subject as creative (Semmler and Pietzner, 2017). Nevertheless, research on teacher perspectives has shown that the importance of creativity for chemistry is widely recognized among chemistry teachers (Tomasevic and Trivic, 2014; Semmler and Pietzner, 2017, 2018; Katz-Buonincontro et al., 2020; Keiner et al., 2020). However, to invent activities that promote students’ creativity is not always straightforward. When German beginner and advanced pre-service chemistry teachers were asked to express ideas on how to promote creativity in pupils during chemistry education only few specific ideas were expressed and difficulties were experienced to link different aspects of chemistry teaching with creativity (Keiner et al., 2020). This could reflect that pre-service teachers have not been directly encouraged to think about the role of creativity for their teaching in a structured way.

In engineering education three primary issues have been identified as contributing to the limited emphasis on creativity within engineering educational programs (Cropley, 2015): (1) overspecialization, where degree programmes focus on narrow specializations, (2) pseudo expertise caused by focussing teaching on factual knowledge and (3) lack of knowledge on creativity in engineering faculties, exemplified by educational staff discussions focussing on “what is creativity?” and “can it be taught” which makes that the wheel is being reinvented and only slight real progress occurs.

In chemistry education we might be in a comparable situation. Even though there is a general cheerful outlook towards teaching for creativity, it is often seen as something extra, and difficulties and tensions are felt with learning of specific chemical concept knowledge.

Motivating views for students. Looking at global patterns in students’ views of science and their interest in science revealed that students of age 10–14 outside Western European Countries showed a greater interest in a career in science than Western European students (van Griethuijsen et al., 2015). Multilevel analysis of these data over different countries revealed that students who agreed with the statement ‘science can help solve problems people face in their lives’ were more interested in a career in science. More expressed interest in science was also observable for students who believed that scientists had a creative job and use their imagination than those students who believed that scientists only deal with facts. These results lead to the suggestion by (van Griethuijsen et al., 2015) that an answer to the decreasing interest in Western Europe for science among young students could be the development of teaching material that highlights scientific research as collaborative, creative and beneficial for society. Probably this is an attractive complement to presenting scientific discoveries as important achievements of lonely and often misunderstood heroes. Positive student learning experiences are also consistently reported for studies in which students are collaboratively learning in a context that addresses real, important or interesting issues (Ültay and Çalik, 2012; Jegstad, 2024).

Communication and signposting

In educational fields with an emphasize on art, architecture or industrial design the development of students’ creativity is probably seen as a key educational goal and is communicated to students accordingly (Cropley and Cropley, 2000). Communication and signposting is an important factor for science students’ creative experience as has been put forward in a study of experiences of biomedical science students (Kim et al., 2019; Kim et al., 2023). Initially these students did not have many creative experiences within their bachelor program as was deduced from Likert-scale responses to statements such as, ‘Learning activities encouraged me to be creative’, ‘I have been marked for being creative’, or ‘The learning activities restrict my ability to be creative’. On the other hand, students did indicate a need for opportunities to be creative as was concluded from responses to statements as ‘I would like to have more opportunities to be creative’ and ‘If creativity was rewarded it would encourage me to be creative’. Despite the students' lack of creative experience, researchers found multiple creative learning opportunities in the program using Bloom's taxonomy for creativity. Three factors were identified that may contribute to this discrepancy of curriculum goals and students experience: a lack of explicit reference to the educational goal of being a creative scholar, a lack of explicit reference to and discussion of creativity at the program, and students having a lack of understanding of creativity. To address this disparity, a workshop was developed with the aim of emphasizing creativity within their course (Kim et al., 2023). Students were first introduced to a model for a creative scientific process in which iterative periods of divergent-and convergent thinking were identified. This model was coupled to the student activities during the course. This approach led to a change in students’ conception of creativity and their perception of creative opportunities in the educational program and future work field. Another approach to help students conceptualize the role of creativity with communication and signposting has been the use of advance organizers (Domin, 2008). Advance organizers are brief presentations of the most general ideas of a subject that the individual is about to learn with references to prior knowledge. Domin showed that making indefinite explication of learning outcomes in relation to the role of creativity generated more informed views of the role creativity plays in the nature of science. Making more definite explications or making no references to creativity learning outcomes at all, did not have this effect.

Evidently, the narrative that comes along with student activities is an important factor for students’ experience of creativity.

The key to critical thinking

Since creativity relies on knowledge, critical thinking, and creative thinking, it is interesting to explore how these aspects have been addressed individually and collectively in science education. Effectively engaging students in critical thinking and problem solving is known to be a challenge for science teachers. Business-as-usual control group students in critical thinking studies often show minimal signs of critical thinking in their lab reports (Holmes et al., 2015; van Brederode et al., 2020). Critical thinking, or its absence, can be made particularly evident when students are confronted with an experimental result that surprisingly disagrees with their expectations, but that is solvable for them when they think a bit further or re-orient themselves (van Brederode et al., 2020; Phillips et al., 2021). Such a study with chemistry pre-university students revealed that students that were prepared for a laboratory project by answering directed questions (paved road condition) did often not express any signs of critical thinking in their final reports when it came to solving a hidden trap in a kinetic observation. This for instance implied that students mentioned to observe the trend they had expected in their data but that was clearly not there, mentioned that they saw a trend but did not indicate in which direction, or when they just ignored the experimental data when writing the discussion. The experimental group that was assigned to a condition to evoke critical thinking, following more the approach of Holmes for ‘teaching critical thinking’ (see below), engaged their experimental data at a higher level and showed more signs of critical thinking in their reports. In the evaluation of the assignment they also agreed more strongly on remarks as: ‘With this assignment, I tried to understand the results and to value the meaning of the results’ (van Brederode et al., 2020).

Making comparisons. The approach to successfully engage students in critical thinking (Holmes et al., 2015), steer students with explicit instructions to think about how they can make a comparison, reflect on their comparison and to act on their comparison. Students are explicitly guided with the help of a decision tree, such as prompts to make a comparison between two datasets or between a dataset and a model. After that, the decision tree suggests thinking of additional measurements to confirm consistency or investigate discrepancies. This approach has effectively enhanced critical thinking in students taking physics laboratory courses (Holmes et al., 2015).

Reasons students may not engage in critical thinking. With every educational assignment some students get engaged with critical thinking and others don’t. Therefore, it is interesting to know why students get engaged with critical thinking, when they do. But also why they don’t, when they don’t.

This has been investigated by analysing recorded discussions of student groups participating in a laboratory course that deliberately steered students in the direction of an unexpected experimental outcome (Phillips et al., 2021).

The authors define Problematizing as dealing with uncertainty by clarifying what you know and don't know, turning confusion into a clear problem or question. The student groups that did problematize were expressing physical reasoning, proposing a new experiment, checking experimental calculations, or consulting an external reference.

Three groups that avoided problematizing were labelled as Uncertain, Silent, or Social. The Uncertain group focused on completing the lab activity as a confirmation task, relying on the manual and ignoring the teaching assistant's guidance to explore other ideas. This mindset hindered their ability to construct new models or understandings. The Silent group appeared not meaningfully engaged in the task, but they were more difficult to comprehend because of their silence. The Social group expressed more off-topic conversations. When they encountered the hidden issue, they were more interested in how to reach a conclusion with these results, rather than understanding the meaning behind them. These students might have considered the provided decision tree to stimulate critical thinking as a usual series of hoops to jump through. On the other hand, their joking around could also reflect students’ discomfort when facing uncertainties. These findings suggest that the mindset of the students is very important and that for fostering critical thinking a learning environment should be created in which students are comfortable with being puzzled. For this instructors should balance between maintaining and reducing uncertainty, assignments could be critically evaluated on explicit and implicit requirements that steer to confirmations, and communication about grading should occur in a non-hoop framing way (Phillips et al., 2021).

Critical thinking in chemistry

The unexpected result in the experiment described above with physics university students was about the effect of a substantial contribution of a buoyant force on beach balls, in addition to gravity and drag force. In this experiment, students link macroscopic observations to models of forces. In chemistry education, we often ask students to interpret what they see with unseen molecular interactions that are being introduced simultaneously, which requires a lot of imagination.

Experiments that demonstrate chemical concepts can be fascinating and valuable for concept development when complemented with group discussions led by a teacher. Asking good questions could trigger critical thinking within students. However, frequently inquiry-based chemistry education assignments seek to enhance the understanding of chemical concepts as well (Jegstad, 2024). These experiments often involve guiding students to notice some particular aspects when they do an experiment. In the student assignment, these aspects need to be identified, even when these observations are not immediately obviously seen. In the long term, this may affect the teaching of critical thinking, as students learn to observe what needs to be discovered.

Inquiry based learning that allow students to apply their limited chemical knowledge for making their own comparisons might be more effective in fostering critical thinking. In such assignments, the goal could be to compare different experiments that illustrate the same chemical concept (that students are already familiar with), in diverse ways, compare different quantitative methods that determine the content of the same substance, compare different reaction conditions, or compare the environmental impact of two production methods.

The key to creative thinking

In order to develop creative thinking skills three requirements are necessary (Cropley, 2015): students should in the first place have the opportunity to engage in creativity. Secondly students must receive positive encouragement as they engage in creativity, and third students must be rewarded when they demonstrate the desired creativity (Cropley, 2015).

Twelve strategies for promoting the habit of creativity in education have been identified by (Sternberg, 2007). It looks to me that these strategies can be roughly classified as follows: two of these strategies can be coupled to promoting the habit of critical thinking, five to promoting the habit of creative thinking and five to promoting a safe creative learning environment.

Coupled to critical thinking are: Question and analyse assumptions and The role of knowledge. Coupled to creative thinking are Redefine problems, Sell your creative ideas, Encourage idea generation, Encourage tolerance of ambiguity and Identify and surmount obstacles. To a safe creative learning environment, I would classify: Encourage sensible risk taking, Build creative self-efficacy, Finding what excites them, The importance of delaying gratification, and Providing a favourable environment.

Key educational elements for providing creative learning opportunities are generally characterized by terms as, providing opportunities for choice and discovery, context rich learning, collaboration, diverse perspectives, risk-taking, reflection, feedback, physical creative supporting learning environments, working at own pace without pressure, open ended assessments, flexibility and dialogue (Davies et al., 2013; Beghetto and Kaufman, 2014; Patston et al., 2021).

In the following sections chemical education studies and new opportunities are discussed in which multiple of these elements can be identified.

Context based chemistry education

In context-based chemistry education chemical knowledge is connected to real life contexts that are relevant to students’ personal life or society. In a systematic review on context-based chemistry education (Ültay and Çalik, 2012) the challenges chemistry education faced and that have been addressed in literature were identified as overloaded curricula, weak linkage between real life and scientific knowledge, students’ difficulties in transferring chemical knowledge to different contexts, chemistry curricula that are isolated from society, a failure to see the reasons for studying chemistry, the passive involvement of students in the learning process, the failure to inculcate scientific literacy between students who will not continue to study the subject and a predominantly traditional chemistry education emphasizing the memorization of facts, theories and rules.

Context-based chemistry education has been devised to address these problems (Gilbert, 2006; Parchmann et al., 2006).

Most of the studies on the effect of context-based chemistry education dealt with teachers’ and/or students’ experiences with the new learning environment (Ültay and Çalik, 2012). These studies reported positive claims on Students’ attitude and Students Understanding/Cognition. But also caveats were mentioned on both points. Even when teachers were positive, it appeared difficult for them to stick to the basic concepts of the context-based learning approach. The approach can be very time consuming, and projects were shortened by reducing open-ended student activities and placing greater emphasis on central point (Parchmann et al., 2006). Regarding the effects on knowledge and reasoning, both positive and neutral claims have been reported. Additionally, a diversity of results has been observed among different groups (Parchmann et al., 2006).

Teachers could feel anxiety for the learning of lower-ability students that struggle with complex contexts or concepts. However, it has been reported that students with the lowest marks showed the highest increase in their appreciation of teaching and learning quality as compared with those with better marks (Ültay and Çalik, 2012).

The struggling with the implementation of educational approaches like Context-Based chemistry might be that in practice it ends up as a battle between efficiently teaching chemical concepts directly or following a time-consuming detour for the sake of higher educational goals. When in evaluation studies students' ability answer specific test problems are prioritized, deeper development of these approaches might be hindered as is the effort teachers want to put in following these approaches.

Creative exercises

Creative exercises are open-ended and student centered questions for assessing and training creative thinking in the context of chemistry education (Trigwell and Sleet, 1990; Lewis et al., 2011; Shaw, 2023). In these 'creativity exercises' students are given a brief prompt and are asked to deduce or calculate as many distinct, correct, and relevant statements (discussed in class) that pertain to the original prompt. Students are not penalized for incorrect statements. If there are responses that are not already indicated on the rubric, they are evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and if credit is given the response is added to the rubric.

For instance, a prompt like H₂(g) + Br₂(g) → 2HBr(g) resulted in a scoring rubric that contained 17 statements that could be received points for. These statements covered fields like bonding types, dipole moments, recognizing that the reaction heat equals the heat of formation of HBr(g), calculation of molar masses, identifying HBr as an acid, identifying the reaction as a redox reaction etc. (Lewis et al., 2011).

In this way creative exercises appeal to students’ creativity, as students need to use divergent thinking when making multiple and diverse connections and use convergent thinking to check each connection for correctness. This could encourage a deeper study strategy along with greater understanding and problem-solving abilities (Trigwell and Sleet, 1990). Creative exercises appear to have a learning curve. For students to do well on these kinds of questions they need to practice with creative exercises under low stress conditions in order to handle these kind of questions on exams. This reinforces the point that creative thinking is a skill students can learn by practising it. Under these conditions accurate and consistent grading with creative exercises appears to be possible as has been evaluated in experimental studies (Lewis et al., 2011).

Setting up experiments as a design task

Setting up experiments as a design task calls on students creative – and critical thinking. It has also shown to have a positive effect on the way chemistry teachers provide feedback to students. In an experimental study in which students worked on the design of a self-heating or self-cooling cup, while also performing chemistry experiments to learn about the energy effects of reactions, it was observed that teachers’ feedback occurred in a more open, constructive, and encouraging when it focussed on design-issues, than when the feedback focussed on chemistry or experimental concepts, where feedback tended to be in closed, clarifying, and steering (Sheoratan et al., 2024). In addition transforming experiments into a design task also could offer more opportunities to train students in giving peer feedback in an open questioning way which helps student groups from stubbornly sticking to an idea in a design assessment (Schut et al., 2020).

Exploring natural materials in a natural way

An interesting opportunity to introduce creativity in the chemistry classroom is by asking students to design new materials with natural resources. The ChemArt cookbook (Pirjo et al., 2020) provides direct examples of playful and hands-on experiments on how sustainable natural resources (mainly cellulose based) can be used to design new materials and how these materials can be applied in everyday life and artistic applications. Through different types of chemical and physical modifications in the experiments, students explore how to produce soft, hard and flexible materials with varying textures, feels, and transparencies. While designing specific properties multiple conditions and recipes can be tried. The material's physical and sensory properties can be analyzed before starting a new experiment cycle. In this way, failures or unexpected material behaviour can be built upon in an iterative approach. More in-depth chemical knowledge can also be called upon in order to explain material properties on a molecular level or to form hypotheses on how different components could be combined to achieve a desired functionality.

Similar chances are with experiments like on agar gels, alginate beads and chitosan (Ward and Wyllie, 2019; Houben et al., 2020; Boyd, 2021; Diekemper et al., 2021; Ducci, 2021), natural colours (Kajiya, 2024), food fermentation (Sörensen, 2023).

Showing the creative nature of chemistry

A book in the Royal Society of Chemistry series on advances in chemistry education (Rees and Newton, 2020) illustrates various examples for creative teaching and learning in chemistry education. This book provides inspiration on escape rooms, multiple sensory learning, cultural chemistry, story telling, performance and drama, practical chemistry, multiple representations and recognizing the importance of language in chemistry learning. Besides the fact that creativity is a skill in demand and worth practicing, the authors emphasize with worked out examples that the successful application of creativity in a learning environment can be emotionally rewarding for both students and teachers.

The key to creativity in chemistry education

Creativity is one of the most important skills for future chemists. Still not that much in-depth research has been performed that directly explores ways to promote creativity within students. There have been initiatives to reform chemistry education, but these initiatives did not directly focus on the construction of assignments that promote creative thinking within chemistry. It may be that a misunderstanding of what creativity means has led to its understated role in chemistry education. For example, creativity does not mean freedom or less structure, it does not mean introducing not relevant context and creativity does not occur without knowledge and field specific skills in a person, or team.

Creative chemists alternately employ convergent – and divergent thinking, which serve as critical – and creative thinking, respectively. Skills required for creativity do not necessarily develop in tandem. They cannot be evoked within students at all times. We could use different teaching methods to teach chemical concept knowledge, and to stimulate critical – and/or creative thinking. For this, we need to look for assignments that allow critical and/or creative thinking in students’ zone of proximal development. Experiments that ask students to apply their limited chemical knowledge to make substantiated comparisons are likely to start with critical thinking, which could ultimately lead to creative thoughts. Assignments that focus on proposing new solutions could start with triggering creative thinking and this in turn could turn to critical thinking. In this way students could gain creative experience and the courage to think critically and creative. As students more often recognize the creative nature of chemistry they might gain more insight in, and possible more motivation for, the field they are studying. Ultimately, few problems have been solved without creativity.

Conflicts of interest

There are no conflicts to declare.

Acknowledgements

Funding from the postdoc-VO project was provided by the Dutch National Steering Committee for Educational Research (NRO project 40.5.22395.014). This program is set-up and supervised by the Freudenthal Institute for Didactics at Utrecht. Appreciation is extended to Floris Rutjes, Martijn Meeter, the editors, and reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and valuable comments.

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