Rioja students are less creative than the country average, but they surpass those in the EU

Rioja students are less creative than the average Spanish student, although they are better than those in the EU. According to the Creative Minds, Creative Schools report, the third volume of the PISA 2022 report, the 15-year-olds examined scored 32.6 points, while the national average was 32.8 and 32.7 for the Organization for Cooperation and Development. economic development. However, in mathematics, reading and science, subjects whose results were already published last December, the students of this community are above average. And, as the OECD points out in its report, creativity is not necessarily linked to a high level in other subjects, although they do have a certain relationship.

This international educational evaluation program, in its 2022 edition, included creative thinking as the innovative competence to measure on a large scale and in a comparative way, given the importance that critical thinking has in today’s society.

La Rioja, if that 32.6 is taken into account, is thus placed below Lithuania, Portugal and Poland and far away from Finland, a country that is always set as an example of educational quality in PISA. However, it is above countries like Germany and neighboring France.

According to data released this Tuesday, in La Rioja 20% of students have a low level in this subject and 24% have a high level. Among those with the highest proportion of students with a high level of creativity, the Community of Madrid (31%), Castilla y León (31%) and Galicia (30%) stand out. Those with a lower proportion are the autonomous cities of Ceuta (10%) and Melilla (11%).

The study also addresses differences by socioeconomic level and, overall, advantaged students perform better than their disadvantaged peers. In La Rioja the difference is below the Spanish average, as is the gap between natives and immigrants.

In this community, always taking into account the results of this report that is prepared among 15-year-old students every three years – except for the last edition due to the pandemic – the young women get better results than them in this competition and this is the case in all communities and countries. However, the differences are less significant in Ceuta, Melilla, Cantabria, Principality of Asturias, Canary Islands, Extremadura, Region of Murcia and Catalonia.

In the same report, what 15-year-old students think about the nature of creativity is analyzed, and for this they were asked if they strongly disagree, disagree, agree or strongly agree with the statement ‘creativity is can express only through the arts (e.g., painting, music, or writing)’. In La Rioja, 83% strongly disagreed or disagreed. Only Cantabrian students had a higher rate (84%).

The survey also gives the vision of the directors of the educational centers in which the students have been evaluated. They are asked if they agree that creativity can be changed by training it and that there are many ways to be creative. In La Rioja, as in Aragón, Cantabria and Melilla, 100% agreed with this statement, above the country’s average values ​​(94%).

These same management teams from La Rioja consider that 77% of their students are creative, the highest percentage in the country, the same as Castilla y León and the OECD average. They also believe that 60% of their students like to do creative projects and that 75% are imaginative. From the other side of the desks, 62% of students consider that teachers value their creativity, and 54% that they give them enough time to find creative solutions to their tasks.

Finally, the relationship between adolescents and digital devices is analyzed. In this community, 33% of 15-year-old students use screens for learning inside school, compared to half who do so on average in Spain; 39% use them for learning outside of schools and 78% acknowledge that they use them beyond the classroom for recreational activities.

The PISA 2022 Creative Thinking test explored students’ competence in three cognitive processes: diverse idea generation, creative idea generation, and idea evaluation and improvement. In view of their overall performance and taking into account the difficulty of the tasks, Spanish students obtained higher scores on tasks that required evaluating and improving ideas than on others.

Julio Fernández Díez knows very well the terrain he walks on. He is a professor of Secondary Education specializing in Educational Guidance and also directs the Educational Guidance team of Logroño Oeste. In his extensive resume he also appears as one of the fathers of the Explora program, which was born at the CEIP Vuelo Madrid-Manila in Logroño as a recreational mathematics workshop and during all these years it has been evolving and incorporating other areas of knowledge. In this program he tries to boost the creative thinking of his students.

– Until now PISA had not focused on creativity and it has done so in this latest report. How important is this competition?

– Creative thinking has always seemed very important to psychologists and to companies as well. In the business world, many resources are dedicated to promoting the creativity of its executives and engineers, it is a fundamental capital. But it is true that in the educational world it is a rather neglected topic. In business there are international figures, such as Edward De Bono, and a lot of relevant people, while in education attention has been paid to other subjects in which Spain, as a country, was not bad at all. A very clear example is coexistence. Spain, internationally, is one of the best countries and La Rioja is one of the best in Spain. However, within the political agendas, a lot of relevance has been given to this issue, which is obviously important, but we are doing very well and this is what the 2022 and 2018 PISA reports say.

– That is, we focus on less urgent issues.

– Yes, everything can be improved, of course coexistence, and any aspect of life, can be improved, but objectively it is the aspect in which Spain comes out best.

– Until now there has been a practical approach of educating based on what companies need. What do you think would need to change?

– Within school curricula there are many aspects, before they were called content, now basic knowledge, and within these a series of things can be prioritized and others can acquire less relevance and for me creative thinking is fundamental. In fact, in one of the programs in which I work, which is the Explora project for students with high abilities, our fundamental axis of work is creative thinking.

– How do they receive it?

– They love. They really like anything that involves putting their imagination into play, they receive it very well.

– Are they games?

– Creativity in the conventional world of the street is thought of as something in the literary or plastic field, but there are many other fields of creativity, such as musical, scientific, and technological creativity. Any aspect of life has its creative component and it is essential to develop it and it can be developed and exercised.