How Creative are Secondary School Students in Nigeria
Year: 2014
Type: preprint
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: This study examined how creative secondary school students are. The research design is a survey of 300 purposively selected Junior and Senior secondary school students from 10 schools in the urban state capital of Makurdi in Benue state, Nigeria. A semi-structured, validated and peer-reviewed 28-item questionnaire built on a modified version of the measuring questionnaire by Torrance was used for data collection. The measurement also included a test for influence of cultural inclinations on creativity. The findings show that many students (29.33%) see creativity as creating ideas to solve problems, and being skillful and imaginative to get something new (27.33%).most (91.0%) claim that they are moderately creative while (51.67%) rated themselves as just creative. Consistently it was found that there was evidence that majority of students (70.33-95.76%) cannot recognise creativity. Within Makurdi urban settlement culture appears not to have much influence on students’ creativity level. Creativity level of students increases as their class level increases but generally the girls were less creative than the boys and science students were consistently, although on a small scale express more creativity than non science students. However, there was no significant mean difference in creativity level among the science, non-science and not sure groups of students; F2, 297 = 0.42, p = 0.66 > 0.05. There was a significant difference in mean creativity level among JS 1, JS 3 and SS 3; F 2, 297 = 3.62, p = 0.03 0.05. Based on the findings and conclusions made, it is recommended that teachers should provide motivating and creatively challenging task for students in class to serve both as source of intrinsic motivation and as a step towards helping the students become more creative.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Institution: Benue State University
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2246673431