Reading time: 15 minutes · Key authors: Guilford · Runco & Acar · Xia et al. · de Vink et al. · Quinn, Rawlings & Roome · Keywords: divergent and convergent thinking · creative thinking · creativity in the classroom · types of thinking · fluency flexibility originality · Guilford · TTCT · 21st-century skills · higher education
There is a question that any educator who wants to teach creativity will inevitably face: how do I explain to my students what creative thinking is without it sounding vague, undefinable, or exclusive to the arts?
The most robust answer that cognitive psychology has produced in more than seventy years of research is this: creative thinking is not a single type of mental process. It is the effective combination of two modes of thinking that most educational systems treat as irreconcilable opposites — divergent thinking and convergent thinking.
Understanding what each one is, how they relate to each other, and what their presence or absence in the classroom implies is one of the most solid theoretical foundations for any educator who wants to work with creativity rigorously and methodologically.
The Origin: Guilford’s Contribution
The distinction between divergent and convergent thinking was formally introduced by J. P. Guilford in his celebrated presidential address to the American Psychological Association in 1950 — now considered the founding document of the scientific study of creativity.
In that address, Guilford posed two questions that became the driving force of his career: How can we identify creative potential in our children and young people? And how can we promote the development of creative personalities? To answer them, it was first necessary to understand what type of cognitive process creativity involved.
Guilford identified that conventional intelligence tests measured almost exclusively what he called convergent thinking: the ability to find the single correct answer to a problem that already has a defined solution. This type of thinking is valuable and necessary, but it is not the only type relevant to human life. Conventional intelligence tests, Guilford argued, actively penalized the other type: divergent thinking.
In his Structure of Intellect (SOI) model, developed from 1956 onward, Guilford classified human cognitive abilities along three dimensions: operations, contents, and products. Within operations, he distinguished between convergent production (finding the single correct answer from given information) and divergent production (generating multiple possible solutions from the same information). This distinction was not merely theoretical: Guilford argued that the educational system was systematically underdeveloping divergent production because it almost never assessed or trained it.
What Is Divergent Thinking?
Divergent thinking is the cognitive ability to generate multiple possible, original, and varied responses to an open-ended problem or a question with no single answer. It is the mode of thinking that operates when someone is asked to generate all possible uses for a paperclip, propose alternative solutions to a complex problem, or imagine every possible way to end a story.
Guilford identified four dimensions of divergent thinking that remain the standard reference framework in contemporary research:
Fluency: the quantity of ideas generated. Measured as the total number of responses produced within a given time. A thinker with high fluency generates many ideas, not necessarily all original.
Flexibility: the variety of categories explored. It is not only about how many ideas are generated, but how many distinct conceptual categories they span. A thinker with high flexibility does not get stuck in a single type of solution.
Originality: the statistical rarity of the ideas. An idea is original if very few people produce it. Measured by evaluating how frequently a response appears in the sample.
Elaboration: the level of detail in developing ideas. A thinker with high elaboration does not merely propose ideas but develops them, specifies them, and adds layers of complexity.
Runco and Acar (2012), in a review published in the Creativity Research Journal and accessed directly from ERIC and multiple verified sources, synthesize the state of evidence on divergent thinking tests with precision:
“Divergent thinking (DT) tests are very often used in creativity studies. Certainly DT does not guarantee actual creative achievement, but tests of DT are reliable and reasonably valid predictors of certain performance criteria. The validity of DT is described as reasonable because validity is not an all-or-nothing attribute, but is, instead, a matter of degree.”
This nuance is important: divergent thinking is not synonymous with creativity. It is a measurable component of creative potential. A person may have high divergent thinking and still not produce relevant creative outcomes if they lack domain knowledge, intrinsic motivation, or the capacity for evaluation and selection. But the presence of developed divergent thinking significantly increases the probability of producing original and useful ideas.
The Torrance Tests: How Divergent Thinking Is Measured
The most widely used tool for assessing divergent thinking in educational settings is the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT), developed by E. Paul Torrance beginning in the 1960s following directly from Guilford’s work. The TTCT includes verbal and figural batteries that measure the four dimensions Guilford identified.
What makes the TTCT a particularly valuable instrument for educators is its long-term predictive validity. In the 50-year follow-up of Torrance’s longitudinal study, Runco, Millar, Acar, and Cramond (2010) found that TTCT scores obtained in childhood predicted creative achievements in adult life. Plucker (1999) had reanalyzed Torrance’s original data and found that childhood divergent thinking test scores were better predictors of adult creative achievement than general intelligence (IQ) — a finding that directly challenged the way most educational systems value and measure student capacities.
This finding is relevant for educators not because they should administer the TTCT in their classes, but because it demonstrates that divergent thinking — the capacity the TTCT measures — has real and lasting consequences for student development. It is not a decorative skill or an educational bonus: it is a predictor of creative performance across an entire lifetime.
What Is Convergent Thinking?
Convergent thinking is the ability to analyze, evaluate, and select among multiple possibilities to arrive at the most appropriate solution to a given problem. It is the mode of thinking that operates when identifying the best answer among several alternatives, when applying a criterion to filter ideas, or when constructing a coherent argument that integrates different elements.
Within Guilford’s Structure of Intellect framework, convergent thinking corresponds to convergent production: given a set of information, find the answer the information determines. It is the type of thinking that conventional intelligence tests measure in the most detail — the capacity for logical reasoning, correct inference, and rule application.
The most frequent error in popular writing about creativity is to present convergent thinking as the opposite and enemy of creative thinking. This characterization is inaccurate and, for educators, dangerous. Contemporary research is clear: creativity requires both types of thinking. Divergent thinking without convergent thinking produces many ideas but no solution. Convergent thinking without divergent thinking produces efficient solutions to known problems but no new ideas.
The most useful distinction is not that one is “creative” and the other “analytical,” but that they operate at different moments in the creative process and with different logics: divergence expands the space of possibilities; convergence deliberately narrows it until the most appropriate solution is reached.
The Evidence: Both Types of Thinking Work Through Interaction
The most recent research has advanced significantly in documenting how divergent and convergent thinking interact in real educational contexts.
Quinn, Rawlings, Taggart, and Roome (2025), in a study published in Thinking & Reasoning (Taylor & Francis), examined the relationship between divergent and convergent thinking in adults using the two standard tasks in the literature: the Alternate Uses Task (AUT) for divergent thinking and the Remote Associates Test (RAT) for convergent thinking. They found positive associations between fluency, originality, elaboration, and a composite score of the AUT with RAT scores — meaning higher divergent thinking was associated with higher convergent thinking. Their findings suggest that creativity emerges from the interaction of both cognitive processes and that the skills measured by both tasks have significant overlap.
De Vink, Willemsen, Lazonder, and Kroesbergen (2022), in a study published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology with fifth-grade primary school students, investigated how both types of thinking related to mathematics performance. Their findings, accessed from PubMed (PMID 34496047), are especially relevant for educators:
“Background: Creativity requires both divergent and convergent thinking. Previous research established that divergent thinking relates to mathematics performance, but generally ignored the role of convergent thinking.”
Their results showed that the role of divergent thinking was twofold: it complements convergent thinking in multiple-solution tasks, and compensates for it in single-solution tasks. In other words: in mathematics (and by extension in other disciplines), divergent thinking does not merely produce more ideas — it also improves the quality of analytical thinking when that thinking alone is insufficient. This interaction is not intuitive for many educators, who tend to treat mathematics as exclusively convergent territory.
The Uncomfortable Finding: Educational Systems Train One and Neglect the Other
Xia, Kang, Chen, Ouyang, and Hu (2021), in a study published in Frontiers in Psychology (PubMed Central, DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.695002), investigated the effect of design training on divergent and convergent thinking in 120 university students divided into three groups: senior design students (with at least four years of design training), junior design students (in their first year), and undergraduate students in majors unrelated to design.
Their abstract frames the central problem of the article with clarity:
“Design training programs that teach creativity often emphasize divergent thinking (generation of ideas) more than convergent thinking (evaluation of ideas). We hypothesized that training would lead to more both types of creativity, but especially divergent thinking.”
The results confirmed the hypothesis: senior design students significantly outperformed the other two groups in divergent thinking. But they did not find the same difference in convergent thinking. The study’s conclusion has direct implications for pedagogical design: programs that teach creativity tend to develop divergent thinking but not convergent thinking with the same effectiveness. This means students leave those programs better equipped to generate ideas, but without having equally developed their capacity to evaluate, select, and bring ideas to concrete solutions.
This finding is not an argument against training divergent thinking. It is an argument in favor of designing creativity education more completely, ensuring that both types of thinking are explicitly trained.
Why Educational Systems Suppress Divergent Thinking
If divergent thinking is so valuable, why do educational systems develop it so little?
The structural answer is straightforward: most educational assessments measure exclusively convergent thinking. Single-answer exams, multiple-choice tests, mathematics problems with one verifiable correct answer — all of these instruments measure the ability to find the already-established correct answer. They do not measure the ability to generate multiple possibilities, explore different categories, or propose statistically infrequent ideas.
The accumulated result of years of exclusively convergent assessment is that students learn, implicitly, that there is one correct answer and their job is to find it. Learning that the correct answer can be multiple, that exploring more possibilities increases the probability of finding the best solution, that the “unusual answer” may be the most valuable — all of this requires an environment that actively models and assesses it.
Guilford was already flagging this problem in 1950: the educational system was producing efficient convergent thinkers and underdeveloping the divergent potential of its students. More than seventy years later, the research of Xia et al. (2021) shows that even programs specifically designed to teach creativity can make the same mistake, emphasizing idea generation without equally working on the capacity to evaluate them.
The DT/CT Dynamic in the Classroom: Not a Choice but a Sequence
One of the most useful frameworks for applying these concepts in teaching practice is what mathematics education research has termed the DT/CT dynamic (divergent thinking / convergent thinking dynamics).
The idea is that the creative process in the classroom is not a choice between “doing divergent thinking” or “doing convergent thinking” — it is a deliberate sequence that alternates between both modes repeatedly. In the divergent phase, many possibilities are generated without filtering. In the convergent phase, they are selected, refined, and developed. The quality of the result depends on the quality of both phases.
De Vink et al. (2022) are precise on this point: the interaction between both types of thinking allows students to implement the most appropriate solution from a range of options, which is especially valuable when no learned solution is available — that is, exactly when creative thinking is necessary.
For the educator, this has a concrete pedagogical implication: it is not enough to allow divergent thinking (free time to generate ideas). It is also necessary to teach the criteria and processes by which those ideas are evaluated and selected. And this must be done sequentially: first expand, then select. Mixing both phases — evaluating ideas as they are generated — produces the worst possible outcome: few ideas and low originality.
How to Integrate Both Types of Thinking in the Classroom
The research reviewed points to a set of concrete pedagogical principles for developing both divergent and convergent thinking in the university classroom.
For divergent thinking:
Pose open-ended questions with multiple valid answers, rather than questions with a single answer. Ask students to generate the largest possible number of explanations, hypotheses, or solutions before evaluating any of them. Use the deferred judgment rule in idea-generation sessions: any idea proposed is recorded before it is evaluated. Present problems from the disciplinary domain that have no known solution or that admit multiple approaches.
For convergent thinking:
Teach explicit evaluation criteria before asking students to select among generated ideas. Train the ability to argue why one solution is better than another in terms of defined criteria, not personal preference. Use evaluation matrices that weight multiple criteria. Ask students to identify the most appropriate solution from several possible ones, justifying their choice.
For the dynamic between both:
Design activities in two clearly separated phases: an expansion phase (divergent, without judgment) followed by a selection and refinement phase (convergent, with criteria). Make the distinction between both phases explicit to students — not as something obvious, but as a metacognitive skill worth developing. Provide explicit feedback on both capacities, recognizing both the originality of generated ideas and the quality of the reasoning used to select them.
The Relationship Between Divergent Thinking, Convergent Thinking, and Intelligence
A clarification that educators frequently need is how divergent and convergent thinking relate to general intelligence measured by conventional tests (IQ).
The research on this is clear but nuanced. There is a moderate positive correlation between divergent thinking and general intelligence: higher IQ is associated with a higher likelihood of divergent thinking. However, the relationship is not linear. The threshold hypothesis, initially proposed by Guilford and revisited in subsequent research (Jauk et al., 2013), suggests that above approximately IQ 120, IQ no longer predicts gains in divergent thinking. That is: a certain level of intelligence is necessary for divergent thinking, but beyond a threshold, other factors — motivation, openness to experience, environment — matter more than IQ.
This finding has direct implications for teaching practice: the student with high IQ is not automatically the most creative, and the student with moderate IQ has no ceiling on divergent thinking development. Both types of thinking develop with deliberate practice across any range of general intelligence.
Divergent Thinking, Convergent Thinking, and 21st-Century Skills
The interest in divergent and convergent thinking in contemporary education is not purely theoretical. There is a broader context that gives it practical urgency.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 identifies creative thinking as the most demanded skill in the global labor market. The OECD has integrated creative thinking as one of the competencies assessed in the PISA program, including divergent and convergent thinking tasks among its assessment items. The structural reason is the same one noted in the CPS article: as well-defined tasks with single answers are automated, the problems that remain for human beings are precisely those that require divergent thinking to be formulated correctly and convergent thinking to be solved optimally.
The university student today who graduates without having explicitly and deliberately developed both types of thinking leaves with a competency gap that the labor market will surface quickly.
Conclusion: Neither Divergent Without Convergent, Nor Convergent Without Divergent
The distinction between divergent and convergent thinking is not an academic curiosity or a philosophical debate about the nature of creativity. It is an operational distinction with direct consequences for how teaching is designed, what activities are proposed, how assessment is structured, and what capacities are developed in students.
The research from Guilford (1950, 1956, 1967) through Quinn et al. (2025), de Vink et al. (2022), Xia et al. (2021), and Runco and Acar (2012) converges on the same conclusion: creativity is neither divergence alone nor convergence alone. It is their productive interaction.
The educator who understands this distinction has a concrete advantage: they can design activities that train each mode separately and then combine them in the correct sequence. They can assess with criteria specific to each mode. And they can explain to their students, with theoretical precision, what they are doing cognitively when they generate ideas, and what they are doing when they evaluate them — and why both things matter.
References
de Vink, I. C., Willemsen, R. H., Lazonder, A. W., & Kroesbergen, E. H. (2022). Creativity in mathematics performance: The role of divergent and convergent thinking. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 92(2), e12459. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12459
Guilford, J. P. (1956). The structure of intellect. Psychological Bulletin, 53(4), 267–293. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040755
Guilford, J. P. (1967). The nature of human intelligence. McGraw-Hill.
Quinn, E., Rawlings, B. S., Taggart, R., & Roome, H. E. (2025). Divergent thinking is linked with convergent thinking: Implications for models of creativity. Thinking & Reasoning, 31(4), 586–608. https://doi.org/10.1080/13546783.2025.2485059
Runco, M. A., & Acar, S. (2012). Divergent thinking as an indicator of creative potential. Creativity Research Journal, 24(1), 66–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2012.652929
Runco, M. A., Millar, G., Acar, S., & Cramond, B. (2010). Torrance tests of creative thinking as predictors of personal and public achievement: A fifty-year follow-up. Creativity Research Journal, 22(4), 361–368. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2010.523393
Xia, T., Kang, M., Chen, M., Ouyang, J., & Hu, F. (2021). Design training and creativity: Students develop stronger divergent but not convergent thinking. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 695002. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.695002