The Relationship Between Creative Classroom Environment And Creative Thinking:The Roles Of Creative Self-efficacy And Autonomous Motivation

Creativity is a key resource in many fields including education and economy in modern society. And researchers have been devoting their attention to the influencing factors of students’ creativity (HU Wei-ping,2010). According to the investment theory of creativity (Sternberg,1991), the cultivation of students’ creativity depended on individual factors (e.g, intelligence, knowledge, thinking styles, personality and motivation) and environment factors (e.g, school climate, family environment). Of these factors, classroom environment played a vital role (Cheng Li, Feng Chao & Liu Yujuan, 2013). So the mechanism of classroom environment on students’ creative thinking had become an urgent topic for discussing and investigating.Study 1:Revised the creative classroom environment questionnaire. On the basis of literature retrieval, this study determined the structure of the creative classroom environment including six dimensions, such as teacher-student relationship, student cohesiveness, involvement, cooperation, teaching methods and equity. The formal questionnaire contains 33 items. The result of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis showed that the creative classroom environment questionnaire has good reliability and validity. The questionnaire’s overall internal consistency coefficient was 0.95 and the coefficient of internal consistency of each dimension in the range of 0.72 to 0.92. Confirmatory factor analysis showed good construct validity.Study 2:This study aimed to explore the relationship among creative classroom environment, creative self-efficacy, academic self-regulation and creative thinking. Four hundred and seventy students (251 boys and 219 girls) from three middle schools participated in the investigation and were measured by revised Creative Classroom Environment Questionnaire, Creative Self-efficacy Questionnaire, Academic Self-Regulation Questionnaire and Creative Tasks (Brain Twister Puzzles and RAT). SPSS 20.0 and AMOS 17.0 were employed to analyze the data. The results were as follows:To be specific, when using Brain Twister Puzzles as the creative task:(1) Creative classroom environment positively predicted creative thinking directly. Besides, the relationship between classroom environment and creative thinking could be partially mediated by creative self-efficacy and autonomous motivation. In addition, creative classroom environment can affect creative thinking positively via the indirect way which autonomous motivation influence creative self-efficacy. On the other hand, when using RAT as the creative task:(1) Creative classroom environment positively predicted creative thinking directly. (2) Creative self-efficacy and autonomous motivation did not have significant impact on students’creative thinking.