Assessing the Linguistic Creativity Domain of Last-Year Compulsory Secondary School Students

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Innovative value of the paper and originality of the research questions could be improved vs presented more convinient: 

What is new? Are there any controversial arguments in the current discussion on creativity? How does your paper contribute to the current stay of research? 

Author Response

In the framework of the creativity research area, there is one everlasting debate about the specificity of creativity domains. Consequently, whether creativity is a general or multi-componential construct and defining how many and which domains of creativity exist are research topics that still encompass challenges in this area. Our study approach, despite its experimental limitations, integrates the assessment of various creativity tasks related to specific skills and/or domains. Particularly, the obtained results pointed out that while students display moderate performance in divergent thinking tasks (typically regarded as a pivotal component of creativity), they have relevant limitations when facing more complex creativity tasks, such as metaphor generation. Hence, our research offers further evidence of the multifaced nature of creativity and provides didactic insights in order to nurture creativity with a holistic approach in the classrooms. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In my opinion, this is a well thought out and brilliantly resolved article. I understand that the poor educational results obtained by Spain in the PISA evaluation require a thorough review of the causes of this situation.

The introduction of a measure of creativity for the first time in the PISA system offers an excellent opportunity to consider the presence of this important variable in the Spanish educational environment.

The article explores the behavior of a (sufficient, though not very representative) sample of students in 3 creativity tasks. The results indicate a certain poverty in terms of the divergent abilities expressed by these students. The article introduces several types of analysis trying to explore the relationships between the different variables used and also considers the question of the sex of the students.

The results are interesting, although I understand that it will improve its explanatory potential with larger and more representative samples. The most important limitation, in my opinion, is that a generalization of this situation cannot be established, taking into account that we lack the PISA results on creativity. Likewise, it would be very convenient to be able to have reference scales or scores between different European countries, in order to obtain more definitive conclusions. However, as a first analysis, the article offers an original contribution, methodologically coherent and has a great opportunity to help in the debate about the consideration of creativity in the Spanish Educational System.

Author Response

We really appreciate the constructive comment of Reviewer 2 and we agree that the generalization of these results is not appropriate. As stated in the manuscript, we are aware about the experimental limitations of our study and we plan to expand the scope of the research by broadening the sample. We also await the publication of the PISA test results and we expect to conduct further research in the line of a cross-analysis between countries. 
In addition, it is worth mentioning that our research group is designing a School Creative Plan in order to provide secondary school teachers with the formation and resources needed to promote creativity in the classrooms.