A recent survey comparing Czech students with their peers from OECD countries found that Czech students lack faith in their creative thinking abilities. The survey, conducted among 15-year-olds, placed the Czech Republic fourth from the bottom in openness to creativity. The study revealed that though the students enjoy learning new things, they do not enjoy doing so in school. Furthermore, they receive minimal support for their creativity in school.
According to Tomáš Zatloukal, head of the Czech School Inspectorate who was in charge of the survey in the Czech Republic, “Students evaluated themselves in terms of their ability to generate various creative proposals, how to approach certain topics, how to develop them, and how to evaluate them. Their diligence and perseverance were also mapped. Only three countries are behind us in this regard, where students evaluate themselves more negatively.”
The survey questionnaire asked the students to indicate their level of agreement or disagreement with ten theses, such as “I like to invent stories”, “I like to think about new ways to solve problems”, “I can propose various solutions to the task”, etc. From this, the creators of the tests compiled an index of openness to creativity. In the OECD country ranking, Czech children ended up fourth from the bottom. Dutch and Slovak children had slightly worse results, with Slovenia having significantly worse results.
The survey also showed that Czech children are significantly less curious than others and generally express more curiosity in everyday situations than in school practice. On the OECD average, up to 70% of students said they like to learn new things, and half said they like to learn in school. It was 60%, or only 30% in the Czech Republic respectively.
However, Czech students didn’t fare too poorly in the creativity tests. They ranked just below the OECD average and above the EU average. Better results were achieved by 14 countries, led by Singapore, South Korea, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Lithuania, Spain, Taiwan, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Israel were on par with the Czech Republic.
At the end of the day, the survey also revealed that creative thinking is closer to girls than boys, which is common in almost all countries. It also confirmed again that in the Czech Republic, even in this area, a student’s socioeconomic status has a significant impact on the results, i.e., children from weaker family backgrounds have significantly worse results.