The changes of creativity among Chinese primary and middle school students (2007-2022)

Global development, when considered in the contemporary international competitive practices, demonstrate that talents represent the key strategic resource. Innovation as well as the core driving force for development. The youth population also crucial motivates the global technological revolution and cross-border collaborative innovation due to their open-mindedness and vitality in cross-border activities. Therefore, it is necessary to explore creativity change trends among primary and secondary school students. Accordingly, this study collected data consisting of data covering 16 years in total with respect to creativity tendencies among Chinese primary and secondary school students. Employing a cross-sectional historical meta-analysis, this finding indicates a continuous increase over the years in the creativity of these students. Their adventurousness, curiosity, imagination, and challenge power factors also exhibit constant positive trends. Further analysis explored the predictive effect of social indicators on creativity. The exploration determined that national education funding, educational funding per student, the availability of full-time teachers and those holding senior titles, and the number of school-based digital terminals exhibit significant or marginal predictive power regarding students' creativity and its components. When comparing students across the three educational stages (primary, junior high, senior high), high school students exhibited the largest growth in overall creativity and challenge power. Primary school students, in comparison, demonstrated the greatest increases concerning adventurousness, curiosity, and imagination factors. A comparison between male and female students indicated no significant overall difference; however, male students displayed a more significant increase in both creativity and its related factors. Innovative talent cultivation hinges upon nurturing student creativity and cultivating the development of factors such as adventurousness, curiosity, imagination, and challenge power. Both augmenting the supply of educational resources and respecting the individual developmental paths of students contribute positively, to a certain degree, toward achieving this objective.