Connecting the Dots: Linking Creativity, Synthesis Skills, and the Students' Anxiety about the Future

In the past few years we have participated in several EU funded projects, aimed to create the educational content and auxiliary ICT tools to support the development of some essential soft skills of the students: the creativity, and the ability to write syntheses of the ideas extracted from various sources. In this context, we produced an easy to use web application for the assessment of creativity based on a new scale, and we also proposed a methodology to evaluate the quality of text summaries written by our students starting from a given source. Through a serendipitous coincidence, this research occurred while we were in search of a means to assess the risk in education, and noticed that the students' anxiety about the future (AAF) might be a good measure of this risk. This paper is an attempt to make sense of the data collected using the newly created tools, by exploring the possible correlations between creativity, summarization skills, and AAF from the perspective of the students' ability to cope with the uncertainties of the future. [For the complete proceedings, see ED579395.]