The role of design thinking in enhancing students’ creative thinking: a narrative review

Abstract

Creative thinking is widely prioritized in education, but schools and universities still struggle to cultivate and assess it consistently. Design thinking (DT) has been adopted as a human-centered, iterative approach that may support creative development through empathy, problem framing, ideation, prototyping, and testing. This narrative review synthesizes peer-reviewed journal research published from 2015 to early 2026 on DT and students’ creative thinking across K–12, higher education, STEM, arts/design, humanities, and teacher education. A structured search of ScienceDirect, Springer, and Google Scholar returned 1,728 records, of which 58 publications met the inclusion criteria. It is among the first cross-domain reviews to focus specifically on creative-thinking outcomes rather than on DT adoption or student learning in general. The review finds overall, but heterogeneous, evidence of a positive relationship between DT and creativity-related outcomes. The evidence base contrasts sharply across domains: in STEM and technology-related settings, creativity outcomes are typically measured with psychometric instruments and quasi-experimental or randomized designs, and a recent meta-analysis of 18 controlled studies reports a large mean effect of DT-based instruction on creativity (d = 0.876; Muneer et al., 2026); in arts, design, and humanities education, evidence is also supportive but predominantly qualitative and process-oriented, drawing on portfolios, reflective accounts, and expert-judged artifacts, which are sensitive to expressive and domain-specific aspects of creativity but rarely permit effect-size estimation. Crucially, not all creativity dimensions respond equally: at least one field experiment found that DT training increased ideational fluency and elaboration while simultaneously reducing originality and flexibility, underscoring that gains on some creativity indicators do not guarantee gains across the board. Across domains, reported outcomes depend strongly on implementation quality, duration, collaboration, teacher expertise, and assessment design. The analysis infers that DT should not be treated as a universal script or guaranteed route to creativity, but as a flexible pedagogical family that can foster creative thinking when it is contextually adapted, adequately resourced, and assessed with multidimensional measures.