Teacher Professional Competence and Elementary School Student Creativity in Southwest Sumba District East Nusa Tenggara Indonesia

ABSTRACT: The implementation of the 2013 Curriculum in the primary school education system inIndonesia aims to develop students’ creativity as one of the 21st-century skills. This research describes thecorrelation between the teachers’ professional competence and the primary school students’ creativity. Theproblem in this research is whether the students’ creativity is correlated with the teachers’ professionalcompetence in primary schools. Data were collected by distributing questionnaires to 1281 students in 26primary schools. The teachers’ professional competence questionnaire consists of 6 items while the students’creativity questionnaire consists of 14 items. The research samples were taken at simple random. The dataanalysis method used Spearman correlation description analysis. Based on the results of the Spearmencorrelation test, it was found that: (1) there was a significant correlation between the teachers’ professionalcompetence and the elementary school students’ creativity; (2) category of correlation between the teachers’professional competence and the students’ creativity was weak; (3) the direction of the correlation between theteachers’ professional competence and the students’ creativity was positive. The correlation between theteachers’ pedagogic competence and the students’ creativity shows the need for efforts to increase the teachers’professional competence to increase the primary school students’ creativity.

KEYWORDS -competence, creativity, primary school, professional, teacher