Characteristics of creative students versus academic performance

Abstract

One of the challenges for Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) in Malaysia is to drive the education system to achieve world class innovation. Finding from the prior researches reveals that creativity is the key component of innovation process and crucial element for students to enhance their competitiveness. As such, this research is conducted to examine the characteristics of creative students in the Faculty of Management (FM), Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and the relationship with academic performance. The research is quantitative based via questionnaire and responded by 60 students from the FM. Through descriptive analysis, Personality, Knowledge and Motivation are suggested as highly important creativity characteristics among FM students. Finding from the research also suggested, Personality and Thinking Style are significant and negatively correlated with academic performance. Meantime, ANOVA result revealed that characteristic of Motivation for Year 3 students is significant higher than Year 1 and Year 2 students. The main implication of the study is there is a need to explore the opportunity to ensure student’s creativity and academic performance are develop in parallel direction.