The Developmental Tendency Of Creativity And Its Relationship With School Support And Autonomous Motivation Across Grades 4-6

Creativity has been widely claimed to be crucial for social adjustment and development for adolescents,and the research has been accumulated on identifying the developmental tendency and the influential factors of creativity.Much of the research which investigated the developmental tendency of creativity adopted cross-sectional design,but the results were inconsistent.Compared with cross-sectional design,longitudinal design was a more reasonable choice to explore the developmental tendency of creativity.Therefore,one purpose of the present study was to explore the tendency of creativity with longitudinal design.Creativity is the interaction of both individual and environment factors.Among the environment factors,supportive environment is the crucial one to fostering children's creativity.To students,school is the most important environment where they spend most of their time interacting with teachers and students.Therefore,school support may positively predict creative performance.Creativity is not only inseparable from the influence of external environment but also be influenced by individual factors.Among the multiple individual factors that influence the development of creativity,autonomous motivation is regarded as a key ingredient.Research has found that,as an individual factor,autonomous motivation not only positively predicted creativity in some cross-sectional studies but was also a predictor for positive outcomes in the future in some longitudinal studies.How does school support and autonomous motivation together influence creativity? According to SDT(self-determination theory),environmental factors which satisfied the basic psychological needs of competence,autonomy and relatedness would influence individuals' autonomous motivation,which in turn affects cognitive,affective andbehavioral outcomes.That is to say autonomous motivation may be the mediator between school support and creativity.Although a bulk of studies support the predictive validity of autonomous motivation and school support on creativity,much of these studies utilize cross-sectional design and only focus on between-individual associations among these factors.Empirical research has yet to use within-individual and between-individual analyses to examine whether the prediction is established on different level and what's the mechanisms underlying these associations.To better explore the developmental tendency of creativity and test the hypotheses,the present study adopted longitudinal design with between-and within-individual analyses.203 Grade 4 students from three elementary schools in Jinan were selected as participants and they were assessed for three consecutive years with using the paralleled tests of figural tasks from Runco Creativity Assessment Battery(r CAB),autonomous motivation subscale from Academic Self-Regulation Questionnaire and teacher support and student support subscales from Perceived School Climate Scale.The main conclusions are as follows:1.Multilevel models indicated that creativity increased across Grade 4 to 6;2.Between-individual analyses found that teacher support and student support significantly positively predicted the rate of increase of creativity;autonomous motivation significantly positively predicted the initial and the rate of increase of creativity;teacher support and autonomous motivation significantly positively predicted the initial fluency and flexibility and the rate of increase of fluency and originality;student support significantly positively predict the rate of increase of fluency,flexibility and originality;3.Mediation analyses found that autonomous motivation mediated the association between teacher support and fluency.More specifically,teacher support enhanced students' autonomous motivation and then positively influenced their creativity,especially fluency.