The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of the creative personality and self-direction of elementary school students to their sociality and the predictability of sociality by creative personality and self-direction, as creative perso...
The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of the creative personality and self-direction of elementary school students to their sociality and the predictability of sociality by creative personality and self-direction, as creative personality and self-direction have lately emerged as important factors in the education sector.
And it's further meant to check the social adjustment of students with creative personality traits and that of self-directed students to give some suggestions on creativity education and self-directed learning. Three research questions were posed:
1. Is the creative personality of elementary school students one of significant variables to predict their sociality?
2. Is the self-direction of elementary school students one of significant variables to predict their sociality?
3. Are there any gender gaps in the predictability of sociality by creative personality and self-direction?
The subjects in this study were 149 students who were in their fifth grade in S elementary school located in the city of Chungjoo, North Choongchung Province. A survey was conducted to address the research questions. Torrance's WKOPAY(What Kind of Person Are You?) was utilized to assess their creative personality traits, and the instrument used to evaluate their self-direction was Lee Hye-ran(2009)'s inventory of 36 items that added one item each to the factors of Nam Yeok-hee(2003)'s scale that modified Guglielmino(1977)'s Self-Directed Learning Readiness Scale(SDLRS) to suit Korean elementary school students. As for sociality evaluation, Joo Jin-lee(2009)'s rearranged questionnaire was utilized, which selected law-abiding, independence, cooperativeness, hard working and socializing as the five factors of sociality. The collected data were encoded and then analyzed by the statistical package SPSS(ver.16.0). The findings of the study were as follows;
First, creative personality was one of significant variables to predict overall sociality and its components. The students who scored higher in creative personality scored lower in overall sociality.
Second, self-direction was one of significant variables to predict overall sociality and its components. All the factors of self-direction were positively linked to those of sociality except the relationship between cooperativeness and interest. And there was a positive relationship between overall self-direction and overall sociality, which denoted that the highly self-directed students had a better sociality.
Third, self-direction and creative personality made a different prediction of sociality according to gender. The two variables made a better prediction of sociality among the girls than the boys, and it implied that the sociality of the girls was under the greater influence of self-direction and creative personality than that of the boys.
In conclusion, the students who had creative personality traits faced some difficulties in fitting into the stiff educational system due to their poor sociality(law-abiding and cooperativeness). Therefore teachers should pay careful attention to creative students. In contrast, the highly self-directed students had a better sociality, and diverse teaching methods should be prepared to take advantage of their good sociality.