Exploring the Connection Between the Students' Creativity and Summary Writing Skills

The students' creativity and "integrative thinking" are highly valued qualities in the modern education. But is there any connection between them? This paper describes a simple experiment aimed to explore the possible connection and mutual influence between the students' creativity and their ability to summarize the main ideas from a given text. The overall creativity of the students who participated in the experiment was assessed by means of a previoulsly developped dedicated software tool. Besides that, their summary writing skills were assessed by a panel of 3 experts, and the scores were normalized to the interval [0-100]. Preliminary experimental data show a good correlation between the creativity quotient CQ and the ability of the students to extract and communicate the main ideas from a written text. Further research is in progress.