Creativity is an indispensable competence for the future of higher education students. Creative thinking skills play an important role in modern society. Creativity is acknowledged as a crucial aspect of business, research and development or arts. This study presents the assessment results of an intervention using cooperative learning and the conventional teaching method in order to promote creative thinking in higher education. The design used was quasi-experimental pretest and posttest intervention using the Creative Intelligence test (CREA), with experimental and control groups of higher education students of the Communication and Multimedia course in a Linear Algebra class. The participants were 50 students from a Portuguese public university. Results showed that students who participated in the intervention scored significantly higher in the creativity test at the end of the intervention and indicated that creative thinking, and divergent thinking abilities in particular, can be enhanced through the kind of intervention that was proposed in the study.

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We state existence and localisation results for a fully nonlinear boundary value problem using the upper and lower solutions method. With this study we aim to contribute to a better understanding of some analytical features of a problem arising in financial modelling related to the introduction of transaction costs in the classical Black-Scholes model. Our result concerns stationary solutions which become interesting in finance when the time does not play a relevant role such as, for instance, in perpetual options.

As there is no critical and creative thinking test built from scratch to be used in Portugal, the focus of this work is the Critical and Creative Thinking Test for Portuguese young adults. We present the exploratory study of validation of this test, applied to 250 university students, aged from 17 to 37, attending a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) or a Human and Social Sciences degree (HSS). From the Exploratory Factor Analysis emerged three factors (creation, argumentation and analysis), which illustrate essential components of critical thinking. The Critical and Creative Thinking Test revealed good psychometric characteristics of constructs validity and reliability (Cronbach's alpha equal to 0.68) and interrater reliability (Cohen's kappa between 0.76 and 0.93 for each dimension). Students of a Master's degree were found to have scored significantly higher on the Critical and Creative Thinking Test than students of a Bachelor's degree, and the scores for STEM students were higher than the scores of HSS students. No statistically significant differences were found in the mean scores of the Critical and Creative Thinking Test according to gender.