An Experimental Study On Relationship Between Intrinsic-extrinsic Motivation And Creativity Of 1-Grade Junior High School Students

The relationship between intrinsic-extrinsic motivation and creativity has long been viewed as one of the important area in creativity research, and a difficult problem. The generalization that intrinsic motivation can increase creativity is commonly accepted as fact in kinds of study. As for the view of relationship between reward and creativity was opposite. Early evidence indicated that creativity could be reduced by reward. But the incremental effect of reward was proved in resent behavior modification procedures if the direction of how to promote creativity was presented, and progress was rewarded. Eisenberger et( 1994,1997,1998) have researched the effects of reward on pupils' creativity. They found that reward evidently increased creativity if there was explicit positive relationship between creativity and reward.In this research we planned to explore the relationship between intrinsic-extrinsic motivation and creativity of 1-grade junior high school students and the effects of differing reward fashions on creativity using methods modified from Eisenberger' s methods. We predicted that intrinsic motivation could promote creativity, and the effects of reward on creativity performance were not significant in high motivation students and were significant in low motivation students, and the effects of processreward were the most.One hundred and eighty-three 1-grade students in the junior high school attached to the south-west normal university and Beibei science-technology junior high school were participated in this experiment. Six groups were produced by the factorial combination of two levels of motivation crossed with three levels of reward fashion. We got the following finds in this experimental condition:(1) Need for cognition was an important intrinsic motivation that obviously affected creativity. High need for cognition was beneficial to creativity, but low need for cognition was harmful.(2) The effects of reward on creativity performance were significant in boys and not significant in girls. The boys in process reward group were judged to be better than that of result reward and zero reward groups regarding novelty performance. The difference of gender of result reward fashion was significant, and the novelty performance of girls was better than boys' .(3) The interaction between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation was not significant.