The influence of school evaluation expectation on adolescent creative potential

Worldwide efforts are underway to bolster creativity in school settings. Hence, there is a need to better understand factors that may influence creativity in this setting to monitor the effectiveness of educational policies and programs aiming to foster students' creativity. However, there is a lack of research on the effect of variables unique to the school context that may hinder creative performance. This study investigated how the explicit school evaluation expectation context influences adolescents' creative potential. 428 adolescents completed four creative potential tasks. The explicit evaluation expectation context was experimentally manipulated. Findings demonstrated that explicit evaluation expectation was associated with lower performance on several aspects of creative potential, with a differential effect according to the creative task considered. Some of these effects were mitigated by school grade and stress-state level. Results are discussed in light of the evaluative context literature and future directions for creativity assessment in school settings.