Assessment of Clothing and Textile Practices and Their Impact on Students' Creative Skills in Secondary Schools in Nasarawa State, Nigeria

Clothing and textile education occupy a central place within Home Economics in Nigerian secondary schools, offering learners structured opportunities to design, construct, decorate, and manage garments and fabric-based products. Beyond vocational competence, this area of the curriculum carries a largely underexploited potential to nurture creative skills such as fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration in adolescent learners. This paper theoretically examines clothing and textile practices in secondary schools in Nasarawa State, Nigeria, and their relationship with students' creative skills development. Drawing on Guilford's (1967) structure-of-intellect model, Torrance's (1974) theory of creative thinking, and Vygotsky's (1978) socio-constructivist perspective, the paper argues that the extent to which clothing and textile instruction stimulates creativity depends on how practices are taught rather than merely on the presence of the subject on the timetable. The review synthesises existing empirical literature, presents a conceptual framework linking instructional practice to creative outcomes, and identifies teacher competence, workshop facilities, curriculum delivery, and assessment style as the principal moderating factors. The paper concludes that where clothing and textile practices are delivered through activity-based, learner-centred methods, they can meaningfully strengthen students' creative capacities, and it offers recommendations for curriculum planners, teacher-training institutions, and school administrators in Nasarawa State.