Evaluation of Creative Thinking Skills amongst Students in Kenya: A Case Study of Public Secondary Schools in Nyeri and Nairobi Counties.

Abstract

Creative thinking skills are vital competencies in the life of every individual. Therefore, people with creative thinking skills are able to innovate and come up with novel solutions to problems that confront them in life. In this way, they become innovators and problem solvers. Creative thinking is competences that enable learners to apply their imagination in generating ideas, hypotheses, and experiment with alternatives to generate new products and processes. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the creative thinking skills among students in boys’, girls’ and co-education public secondary schools (PSC) in Nyeri and Nairobi Counties. The study adopted the descriptive survey research design guided by the social cognitive theory as its theoretical framework. The target population consisted of 69,220 learners in 300 PSC in Nairobi and Nyeri Counties. The schools in the two counties were stratified into boys, girls and mixed-sex schools. Therefore, 4 boys’, 5 girls’ and 21 co-education secondary schools were selected to form a sample of ten percent of the schools from each stratum. Data was collected using a questionnaire administered to the sampled students. A total of 391 respondents were sampled in both counties. Analyzed data indicated that the students in Nairobi County had moderately higher creative thinking skills than their fellow students from Nyeri. The computed mean score for students’ creative thinking skills per county were; Nairobi ( 3.06) and Nyeri with ( 3.03). Independent Sample t-test of creative thinking skills of learners in both gave a pvalue 0.584 which was above 0.05 significance level, this indicated that there was no significant difference in creative thinking among students in Nairobi and Nyeri Counties. Additionally, the study sought to find out the creative thinking skills among learners in single sex and co-education public secondary schools in the two counties. Data analysis revealed that girls schools posted the highest level of creative thinking abilities ( = 3.08), followed by boys schools ( =3.07) while mixed-sex secondary schools had a mean score of 3.01. The computed ANOVA for boys, girls and mixed- sex secondary schools, yielded a p values of 0.478 which was above 0.05 significance level, indicating that there was no significant difference in creative thinking skills among students in single sex and coeducation secondary schools at 95% limit. Therefore the null hypothesis was accepted and concluded that the creative thinking abilities among students in the three categories of schools were relatively the same. The study concluded that there is need to strengthen creative thinking skills among learners in the three school categories in both counties in Kenya.