Abstract
There is an increasing demand by society that university students demonstrate competitive skills to enable them to achieve greater success when entering the workplace. Creativity and life satisfaction correlate positively with academic performance, productivity, and excellence in the working environment. The presence of creativity and emotional intelligence in the curriculum and teaching methods in Spanish universities, however, is surprisingly lacking. Studies that examine gender differences in these variables provide conflicting results. The purpose of our research is to analyse the changes produced in both creativity and life satisfaction in university students by a positive emotional and creative intervention and explore individual differences by gender. The methodology used was a quasi-experimental pre- test/post- test design with experimental/control groups. Three hundred university students (23% men and 77% women) from the Community of Madrid (Spain) completed three exercises that evaluated creativity and life satisfaction. The results show significantly higher results in creativity and life satisfaction in women, who continued to achieve high results after the intervention. Finally, we discuss the need for emotional and creative education in universities and focus on the employability and the guarantee of equal opportunities through the development of these competencies.
Highlights
Today it is increasingly important that students leave university with the necessary skills and ability to demonstrate that they are competitive as this will enable them to achieve greater success when entering the workplace
In response to the first objective, we present the creativity and life satisfaction level data of the participants
Evaluated with the SWLS (U = 9483, p = 0.022), in the experimental group after the intervention (Me = 6, on a scale of 1-7) compared to the control group (Me = 5.6). These results indicate that the emotionally positive and creative intervention in the classroom improved the results of this variable in the students who worked with this methodology in their classroom, compared to those who worked with a traditional methodology
Summary
Today it is increasingly important that students leave university with the necessary skills and ability to demonstrate that they are competitive as this will enable them to achieve greater success when entering the workplace. Creativity and life satisfaction contribute to this skill, as they help nurture both personal and social development, and are positively related to academic performance (Figueiredo-Ferraz et al, 2009; Anwar et al, 2012; Belmonte, 2013; Saremi and Bahdori, 2015; Bernabé et al, 2017; Peña García et al, 2017), productivity, excellence at work (De Ávila et al, 2019) and the ability to be innovative. The European reference framework focuses on the need for creativity to be a key aspect on which the rest of the competencies be based and emphasizes its importance in university students’ overall learning processes (Álvarez-Santullano and De Prada Creo, 2018). The exception was creativity, our interest in the analysis of the lack of creativity in our university students
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