Teacher's perception of intelligent and creative students

Abstract

We aimed to evaluate how public and private school teachers
perceive intelligence and creativity. We investigated a sample of thirty-eight
primary and secondary school teachers (N = 38; n=15 private school; n=23
public school) of the city of Campinas (SP) by means of a questionnaire we
developed on our own. It included four open questions on how teachers
understand intelligence and creativity, as well as the features of intelligent and
creative students. A content analysis allowed us to identify five categories
(thinking and reasoning, doing and transforming, memory, biology, attitude and
behavior) and to perform the descriptive statistics. The results showed that the
teachers understand the assessed skills as ability. Thinking and reasoning is
associated to intelligence, while doing and transforming are rather related to
creativity. Regarding the features of intelligent students, public school teachers
mostly mention the ability to think, whereas private school teachers highlight
doing and transforming as the most outstanding feature. Regarding the features
of creative students, both public and private school teachers seem to believe
that diversified attitudes and behaviors are the most typical features of creative
students.