Relaciones e influencia del contexto sociodemográfico en la inteligencia y la creatividad de una muestra de alumnado de Educación Secundaria Obligatoria en la Región de Murcia

Resumen

The main objective of PhD entitled "Relaciones e influencia del contexto sociodemográfico en la inteligencia y la creatividad de un grupo de alumnos de Educación Secundaria Obligatoria" is to study the influence that sociodemographic factors exert on intelligence and creativity, in a group of Compulsory Secondary Education students in Murcia (Spain). In order to make this objective operational, and to we can assess it reliably, we have delimited it down into four specific objectives, which are: 1. Analyze the participant’s sociodemographic status 2. Study the relationship between psychometric intelligence test scores and sociodemographic variables 3. Study the relationship between creativity variables and sociodemographic variables 4. Establish the sociodemographic factors’ influence (and predictive power) on the creativity level of Secondary students, when the intelligence variable is controlled. Regarding the methodology carried out, it should be noted, first of all, that students were from different high schools in Murcia (from the towns of Lorca, Caravaca, Molina de Segura and Murcia city). The data from the study belong to the research project EDU2014-53646-R, which aimed to test a new model for identifying giftedness and talent, and for which data were collected from a total of 11 high schools, of which three of them were not used in our empirical analysis, because for various reasons they did not meet the objective of our research. Therefore, a total of 807 secondary-education-level-students participated in this study. Students filled out different tests in different phases of the research, and it was also possible to know the educational level of 291 mothers and 283 fathers. In addition, information on the perceived family socioeconomic level of 229 students could be collected. In order to collect information on the three main variables, different instruments were applied: to evaluate intelligence, the Differential Aptitudes Test (DAT-5, Bennett et al., 2000) was used; for the assessment of figurative creativity, the Torrance Thinking Creative Test (Torrance, 1974); for the evaluation of verbal creativity, the PIC-J test (Artola et al., 2008); as well as two tests to evaluate domain-specific creativity in the area of science (the Scientific-Creativity Thinking Test, by Hu & Adey, 2002; and the Creative Scientific Ability Test, by Sak & Ayas, 2013). Likewise, an ad hoc questionnaire was applied to assess some characteristics of the students' sociodemographic environment. Addressing the procedure carried out, it is worth saying that as a PhD student I collaborated in the application of the different tests. After this application, they were corrected and the different responses were included in a database using the SPSS version 21.0 program (for Windows). Highlight the great difficulty encountered in terms of correcting and grading the scientific creativity evaluation tests, which entailed enormous involvement on my part. Once we had all the data in the database, we began with the empirical data analysis. In general, results showed higher scores in intelligence and creativity test for those students with a higher level of family finances. Therefore, at a general level, these results indicated that the family economical level is related to the students abilities, and shows that the family economical level is an important factor that influence in cognitive and creative abilities of high school students.