Learning skills, creativity, and self-efficacy in vocational school students

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The present study aimed to investigate the association between learning skills and creative thinking and to assess their relations with self-efficacy. In doing so, we used an approach that aimed to go beyond the dichotomous comparison between students with Specific Learning Disability (SLD) vs. students without SLD, which could potentially reduce complexity. Given that learning skills are distributed across a continuum, we considered them as continuous measures to study their association with creativity. Standardized reading, text comprehension, math tests, and creativity (TTCT) and creative problem-solving tasks, together with Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices and the General Self-Efficacy scale, were administered to 180 high school students, aged 14 to 17 years, attending a vocational school. Regression analyses showed that reading speed, comprehension, and multiplications skills were negative predictors of fluency and flexibility and positive predictors of elaboration in divergent thinking, whereas reading accuracy positively predicted fluency and flexibility and negatively elaboration. Creative problem-solving skills were positively predicted by reading speed and comprehension and negatively by reading accuracy. A negative correlation was found between fluency and self-efficacy, which resulted to be positively correlated with reading accuracy. These findings emphasize the possibility to compensate for learning difficulties by using creative potential as a protective factor contrasting the risk of abandoning school prematurely, thus supporting poor-achieving students in the decrease of self-efficacy and satisfaction in their school career.