Examination of secondary school students' academic achievement, learning styles and creative thinking tendencies

The purpose of this research is; to investigate the relationship between academic achievement, learning styles and creative thinking skills of eighth grade students. Participants of the research are; 71 students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and studying in the eighth grade of a secondary school in a central district of Gaziantep. In this study, Grasha-Riechmann Learning Style Scale that was developed by Grasha-Riechmann (1994) and adapted to Turkish by Sarıtaş and Süral (2010); The Torrance Creative Thinking test that was developed by Torrance (1966) and adapted to Turkish by Aslan (2001) and the lecture notes of the students obtained from e-okul were used as data collection tools. The data collected from the participants were transferred to the SPSS 22 program and analyzed using descriptive analysis, Anova and t-test analysis. According to the findings obtained from the analysis made; it has been observed that the students participating in the study mostly have participant learning style; it is followed by competitive, dependent and collaborative learning styles; and they have independent and avoidant learning styles as the least. It has also been found that the highest of the students' arithmetic means of creativity aspects belongs to fluency, followed by originality, and the lowest belongs to flexibility. It has been seen that the arithmetic means of the lecture grades of the students participating in this research have been listed from the highest to the lowest as; English, social studies, mathematics, Turkish and science. When the distribution of students' course grades by gender is examined; it is found that female students' Turkish, mathematics, science and English grades and their overall grade point averages are significantly higher than male students. When the relationship between the academic achievement and learning styles of the students participating in the study is examined; it has been observed that there is a significant difference among Turkish, social studies and English courses' grades and grade point averages in terms of learning styles. When it is examined among which learning styles the students' grades differ significantly; it has been determined that students with participant learning style have significantly higher Turkish course and grade point averages than students with dependent learning style. When the relationship between students' creative thinking skills and their academic achievement is examined; it has been observed that there are significant, positive correlations between the scores of all sub-dimensions and the total creativity scores and the grades of different courses, varying between low and medium levels. When the scores of the creativity test according to the learning styles of the students participating in this study are examined; it has been seen that they are ranked from the highest to the lowest as; students that have collaborative, participant, competitive, dependent, independent and avoidant learning styles, however; it has been determined that these differences between students' creativity scores are not statistically significant. The results obtained from this research have been interpreted and discussed in the context of related research results and theoretical explanations; in the light of the results, recommendations for the future research and practice have been developed. Key words: Secondary school students, academic achievement, learning styles, creative thinking.