Motivation for Creativity in Design Students

The purpose was to study motivation for creativity in design students in the framework of the cognitive orientation theory which defines motivation as a function of beliefs of four types (about goals, norms, oneself and reality) concerning themes identified as relevant for creativity. It was hypothesized that scores of the four belief types would enable predicting creativity. The participants were 52 design students who were administered an actual design task and questionnaires: The Survey about Attitudes, Questionnaire about Designing and the Cognitive Orientation of Creativity (COQ-CR). The independent variables were the scores of the belief types based on the COQ-CR. The dependent variables were the evaluation of the creativity of the designs by four expert architects, and various variables based on self-evaluation of the students in the questionnaires referring to the design and designing process: fluency, flexibility, elaboration, fulfilling requirements, considering the context, having a central idea, meaningfulness of the task, involvement of feelings in designing, and handling constraints. Regression analyses showed that the majority of variables referring to creativity were predicted significantly by the predictors. The findings support the validity of the COQ-CR for assessing motivation for creativity and of the cognitive motivational approach to creativity. Notes Note. In the third column, the first number is the mean and the second (in parentheses) is the standard deviation. SA = Survey of Attitudes about Creative Design Problem (see Table 1). Note. The numbers in the cells are saturations of the variables on each of the factors. The highest saturations that are considered for defining the factor are typed in bold. a The factor analysis was performed according to the principal components rotated varimx procedure after Kaiser normalization. Note. The numbers in the cells are saturations of the variables on each of the factors. The highest saturations that are considered for defining the factor are typed in bold. a The factor analysis was performed according to the principal components rotated varimx procedure after Kaiser normalization. Note. The first row presents the results in regard to the architects' evaluation, rows 2–12 the results in regard to the variables based on the students' responses. a The degrees of freedom are 4/48. ∗p < .05, ∗∗p < 01, ∗∗∗p < .001. ∗p < .05, ∗∗p < .01, ∗∗∗p < .001.