Creativity profiles in first-year students of teacher training. An exploratory study

Abstract

Creativity has become an essential skill in today’s society, defined as the capacity of human beings to generate new and valuable ideas that imply a certain degree of originality and adaptation to reality. In addition, creativity is considered a transversal competence in Higher Education, essential to achieve a higher level of learning and the improvement of teaching-learning processes. The objectives of this work are to know the creative characteristics (type and degree of creativity) of the first-year students from Saragossa University of Teaching in Infant and Primary Education and to establish different student profiles. To this end, a simple descriptive, transversal and ex post facto study has been carried out with 110 first-year students in Early childhood and Primary Education, aged 18.19 ± 1.81. The evaluation of the creative potential has been carried out with the Test of Creative Imagination (PIC). A descriptive, correlational and cluster analysis has been carried out to identify the profiles according to the type of creativity of these students. The results have shown three types of students, with a high degree of creativity, an intermediate one and a low one, in which narrative creativity has a preponderant value in the configuration of these profiles. The conclusions go deeper into the specificity or generality of creativity and its implications in university teacher training.