Comparison of flexibility, emotional creativity and cognitive creativity in monolingual Persian-speaking and bilingual Arabic-Persian-speaking students

The present study was conducted to compare flexibility, emotional creativity and cognitive creativity in monolingual Persian-speaking and bilingual Arabic-Persian-speaking students. The study methodology was causal-comparative. The statistical population consisted of all the monolingual Persian-speaking and bilingual Arabic-Persian-speaking students in Ahvaz, Iran. Multi-stage cluster sampling was used to select the study samples, including 80 junior high school students (40 bilingual and 40 monolingual students). The Cognitive Flexibility Inventory (CFI) developed by Dennis and Vander Wal (2010), the Abedi-Schumacher Creativity Test (ACT) (1984) and the Emotional Creativity Inventory (ECI) by Averill (1999) were used to collect the data. An ANOVA was used to analyze the data. The results showed a significant difference between the bilingual and monolingual students in terms of the mean cognitive flexibility, emotional creativity and cognitive creativity (P<0.001). In other words, bilingual students possessed higher levels of cognitive flexibility, emotional creativity and cognitive creativity than the monolingual students.