The Relationship Among Primary School Teachers' Achievement Goal Orientation, Creativity Teaching Efficacy And Creativity

Teachers play an important role in student creativity fostering. Therefore it is necessary to study teachers'creativity fostering behavior and factors influence them to make them the true promoter of students'creativity development. In general, motivation roles directly in the dynamic behavior. However, recent studies found that motivation's role was affected by deeper psychological factors, such as the cognition of goal situation, personal capacity and other factors. That is, the cognitive interference has mediator effect between the achievement goal orientation and behaviors. Teaching efficacy is such an cognitive factor. According to the theoretical view of Bandura, only when the teachers think that they can manage some teaching strategies, will they put them into their practical teaching activities on the basis of their achievement goal orientation. Accordingly, present study assume that the primary school teachers'creativity teaching self-efficacy has mediator effect between their achievement goal orientation and their creativity fostering behaviors.Present study investigated 382 primary school teachers to revise the teachers'achievement goal orientation questionnaire and creativity teaching self-efficacy questionnaire to make them suitable for primary school teachers. Then using the two revised questionnaires and the creativity fostering behavior questionnaire, we investigated 486 primary school teachers to examine the participants'achievement goal orientation, their creativity teaching self-efficacy and their creativity fostering behaviors and the relationships among them. The main methods used in this study were ANOVA, correlation analysis and SEM. Main conclusions are as follows:1. The primary school teachers in this study have appropriate achievement goal orientation. Learning goal orientation and performance-approach orientation are dominant in all teaching age groups; all groups differentiate significantly in performance goal orientation (performance-avoid orientation and performance- approach orientation). Specifically, primary school teachers with teaching ages of 1~5 years has lower performance goal orientation than that of other group teachers. With the growth of teachers'teaching ages, the level of performance goal orientation increases gradually and gets to the highest level in teachers whose teaching ages above 25 years; male teachers show more performance goal orientation than female teachers.2. The primary school teachers have positive tendency in creativity teaching self-efficacy. Self-affirmation has higher scores than the other dimension and increases with the teaching ages, the group with teaching ages above 25 years has the highest self-affirmation; male teachers has more negative self-awareness than female teachers, but female teachers'creativity teaching self-efficacy and self-affirmation level is higher than male teachers'.3. The primary school teachers practiced the creativity fostering behaviors in their teaching and achieved initial results. But dimensions development is not balanced: flexibility encouraging is better than learning style instruction and motivation inspiring; views judgment is the worst; teaching age has main effect in motivation inspiring, teachers with teaching ages of 1~5 years scored higher than the other three groups; A similar trend was shown in all teaching age groups: the longer they engage in education, the less creativity fostering behaviors they exhibit, and the creativity fostering behaviors reach the minimum when they engage in teaching above 25 years.4. The primary school teachers'achievement goal orientation, their creativity teaching self-efficacy and creativity fostering behaviors are positively related; the primary school teachers'creativity teaching self-efficacy has total mediator effect between their performance-avoid orientation and creativity fostering behaviors; it also has part mediator effect between their learning goal orientation and creativity fostering behaviors.