I thought it followed the Socrates tradition in that the true philosopher is the one asking the questions, and it is the role of the student to answer them.

I wish I remembered who I am quoting here

I believe that developers who orient their thinking/work around the problem they're solving instead of the solution they're implementing generally have a better outcome.

I wonder if that's what was happening with the artists in the study? The "successful" artists were really focusing on what they were trying to achieve, putting their time and attention into that?

(But then this ties into other comments here about the criteria for success. Maybe success in software problem solving doesn't correlate that well with success as an artist. I think success as an artist comes down to being considered an artist by the artist gatekeepers, who are some combination of other artists and people who fund artists.)

I wonder if the quality of the art suffered within the context of the experiment because of the time constraint, even if in the long run those people tended to create better art.

There are plenty of artists who can do well on SATs, and can fill out bureaucratic forms, and complete one-hour timed tests. They might well take a lot of time to think and explore when they are making their own art on their own schedule.

But I know artists who just can't function well under artificial constraints and can't adapt well to someone else telling them how to create art.

    If you were accepted into the painting faculty, you were an artist,
    If you were accepted into graphics faculty, you were color-blind,
    If you were accepted into sculpture, you were blind,
    If you were accepted into art history, you couldn't be taught to draw.

Likewise, in this article, the approach to defining creative thinking is... so simplistic, and the test is so irrelevant...

Just to try to give you some background as to why a student could choose one approach or the other: if a student wasn't told why they need to draw a still life, they probably didn't care much for the outcome either. Artists rarely know why they prefer one composition over the other, especially in academic studies like... still life. To an artist, the selection of objects for a still life is really arbitrary, their arrangement is arbitrary -- it makes no difference. To make an interesting still life, one would have to find something that would interest other artists in it. Like, for example, how one can show different textures of the objects of the same nominal color using color? Or... would a technique that models volume through the thickness / intensity of contours work on mostly round objects? And so on.

Later, the article is trying to assess the artist's accomplishments in ways artists would frown upon. The number of exhibitions? The sales in prestigious galleries? Yeah... as a student I spent some time working in the lab of Kadishman (the guy who draws the same sheep over and over, and then sells it for insane $$). The "master" doesn't even draw the sheep anymore. It's all Shinkar / Bezalel students who do it :D And, honestly, the sheep is one of the biggest frauds I've personally witnessed in this profession (there are, of course, things like the diamond skull from Damien Hirst, which are more expensive because of the materials used, but I didn't have a chance to behold the miracle with my own eyes).