| Creativity has been of great interest to both researchers and practitioners alike. At the core of this interest are the causes of creativity—that is, what individual and environmental factors, if any, contribute to the individual's creative achievement. This dissertation project was dedicated to address this issue. It sought to address this question by examining the influences of both individual and environmental factors on student creative performance in the Chinese context. Two studies were conducted to examine the effects of individual characteristics (such as intelligence, personality, and motivation) and social-environmental factors (such as families and schools) on creativity. More specifically, the Study 1 primarily used self-report questionnaires and psychometric tests in a sample of 357 Chinese high school students to investigate how both individual and social-environmental factors could predict student creativity in the art and language domains and their general creativity thinking. The study was based on Sternberg and Lubart's (1995) investment theory of creativity, in which six distinctive resources, namely, intelligence, personality, motivation, thinking styles, knowledge, and environment, are believed to be critical to creativity. The second study comprised an experiment conducted on a sample of 180 Chinese high school students, which was designed to scrutinize the effects of prompting and coaching students to be creative on their creative performance in the domains of art and literature.; The results of the two studies confirmed this project's major hypothesis that both the individual and environment play decisive roles in Chinese student creativity. Specifically, Study 1 showed that both individual and social environment factors significantly predict creativity. The second study further demonstrated that one's creativity could benefit from receiving appropriate environmental support (e.g., coaching to be creative). Implications of these findings were discussed. The paper also called for a serious consideration of research on environmental influence on creativity and various mechanisms of this influence. |
