Creativity of students’ stories: Case study at primary school

The paper explores a question relevant to educational practice: to what extent are teachers’ assessments of students’ creative story writing reliable and useful for gaining insight into students’ creative production in this domain, and for shaping and providing adequate support to creative potential of young people at school setting. Participants in this study were sixth and seventh grade primary school students who wrote stories (N=142), and teachers who assessed creativity of these stories (N=3). A statistically significant, but low agreement was found among teachers’ assessments of the stories’ creativity. The teachers identified two groups of creativity indicators: the first group refers to expression in the verbal domain (knowledge of language, playing with language), while the other group refers to creativity in general (originality, sentiment, ethic dimension). Case studies of four most creative story writers failed to find a typical profile with critical contribution of any indicator or precondition for their creative production. Narrative analysis of the most creative stories confirmed the existence of those indicators of creative potential which the teachers reported in their essays. It is concluded that an individual approach in interpreting data on the child’ talents is necessary even at the primary school level. It is recommended to combine qualitative and quantitative methods, which enables obtaining data that would not be accessible by using only one or the other approach. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 47008: Improving the quality and accessibility of education in modernization processes in Serbia i br. 179034: From encouraging initiative, cooperation and creativity in education to new roles and identities in society]