Relationship between creative thinking and experimental design thinking in science education: Independent or related

Experimental design thinking and creative thinking have been increasingly recognized as the crucial basic thinking to promote scientific and technological innovation. And developing students' experimental design thinking and creative thinking is considered as the key point to cultivate innovative talents. But the relationship between experimental design thinking and creative thinking remains contradictory. In this study, we construct a structural equation model to verify the hypothesis of experimental design thinking and creative thinking based on the thinking classification theory and creative problem-solving model. The results show that there is a positive correlation between fluency in creative thinking and experimental design thinking, but variable thinking and reflective thinking in experimental design thinking are negatively related to creative thinking. That means, experimental design thinking and creative thinking are neither completely separated, nor undifferentiated. Instead, they are different from each other but complement each other, constituting a unified whole of innovative experimental design thinking. These findings fill in the theory of experimental design thinking and creative thinking, and provide important theoretical support for training innovative scientific and technological talents.