The Developmental Tendency Of Creativity And Its Relationship With Need For Cognition Across Grades 7-9:The Moderating Role Of School Climate

Creativity has been identified as the ability to create product that is original and appropriate.Creativity plays an important role in the progress of society and the development of the individual.The research on the development of creativity and its influencing factors has always been the focus of attention.At present,the majority of previous studies have examined the development trend of creativity using cross-sectional design,which can not reveal the regularity of creativity with time.And it is difficult to exclude the peer effect.In recent years,a longitudinal study of creativity has been developed and some valuable research results have been obtained.However,these few longitudinal studies are carried out in the general creativity field,such as speech,graphics,etc.,and can not reflect the development of creativity in special fields.According to the person-environment fit theory and the ecological system theory of creativity,individual development is the result of the interaction of both individual and environmental factors.As an important personality characteristic,need for cognition has an important affect in creativity.School is the most important environment where students spend most of their time interacting with teachers and the other students,so the school climate plays a vital role in the development of students' psychology and society.How they influence the development of creativity is also an important topic in this study.Based on the above problems,the present study adopted longitudinal design to explore the developmental tendency of creativity and its relationship with need for cognition and school climate.275 Grade 7 students from two middle schools in Jinan were selected as participants and they were assessed for three consecutive years with using the paralleled tests of real-life problem solving tasks from Runco Creativity Assessment Battery(rCAB),the need for cognition scale and the perceived school climate scale.The main conclusions of the present study were as follows:1.Multilevel models indicated that creativity decreased across Grade 7 to 9;2.Significant gender difference was found in developmental speed of fluency from Grade 7 to Grade 9,Boys had a faster drop than girls.3.Between-individual analyses found that need for cognition significantly positively predicted the initial level of total creativity and fluency;Within-individual analyses found that need for cognition significantly positively predicted the developmental speed of total creativity / fluency / flexibility,and significantly negatively predicted the developmental speed of originality;4.The moderating effect analysis showed that teacher support played a negative moderating role in the need for cognition and total creativity / flexibility.Student –student support played a positive role in the need for cognition and total creativity / flexibility.However,opportunities for autonomy in the classroom had no moderating role in need for cognition and creativity.