This study explores how adolescents regulate their activity while working on creative projects. A large sample (N = 739) of Polish adolescents reported on their most creative, complex project conducted within the last year and answered retrospectively framed self-regulation items related to this specific activity. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated a consistent pattern of self-regulation, capturing pre-task self-regulatory strategies (obstacles expectations, uncertainty acceptance), during-task strategies (adjusting approach, managing and reframing ambiguous goals, emotion regulation and dealing with obstacles), and post-task strategies (improving approach, readiness for sharing). Participants' personality, creative self-concept, and creative mindsets were robustly related to the different strategies reported. Additionally, strategies resulted in differences in judges-assessed creativity of the projects conducted. We discuss the theoretical consequences and future research directions for creative self-regulation studies.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is influencing our lives in an enormous and unprecedented way. Here, we explore COVID-19-lockdown's consequences for creative activity. To this end, we relied on two extensive diary studies. The first, held on March 2019 (pre-pandemic), involved 78 students who reported their emotions and creativity over 2 weeks (927 observations). The second, conducted on March 2020 (during the pandemic and lockdown), involved 235 students who reported on their emotions, creativity, and the intensity of thinking and talking about COVID-19 over a month (5,904 observations). We found that compared with 2019, during the lockdown, students engaged slightly yet statistically significantly more in creative activities. An analysis of diaries collected during the pandemic also showed that the days when students spent more time discussing or searching for information about COVID-19 were characterized by a higher creative activity yet also mixed emotions. We discuss potential explanations of these unexpected results along with future study directions.

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Creativity is agentic, and so is learning. People create and learn new things most effectively when they are convinced that they can respond appropriately to the task (creative confidence) and value the activity at hand. This investigation explores the role of the relatively understudied aspect of creative agency: self-regulatory strategies. In a longitudinal study, we tested whether self-regulation strategies, previously found to be essential drivers of academic achievement and learning in general (rehearsal, elaboration, critical thinking, and metacognition), might also support creativity in learning. Specifically, we tested sequential mediation, where creative confidence and self-regulation longitudinally mediated the relationship between creative potential (divergent thinking) and effective application of creative skills to solve problems embedded in school subjects. Our findings confirm that self-regulatory strategies predict providing creative solutions to school tasks (a proxy of creative learning) and mediate the relationship between divergent thinking, creative confidence, and creative learning.

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This study explores how adolescents regulate their activity while working on creative projects. A large sample (N = 739) of Polish adolescents reported on their most creative, complex project conducted within the last year and answered retrospectively framed self-regulation items related to this specific activity. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated a consistent pattern of self-regulation, capturing pre-task self-regulatory strategies (obstacles expectations, uncertainty acceptance), during-task strategies (adjusting approach, managing and reframing ambiguous goals, emotion regulation and dealing with obstacles), and post-task strategies (improving approach, readiness for sharing). Participants’ personality, creative self-concept, and creative mindsets were robustly related to the different strategies reported. Additionally, strategies resulted in differences in judges-assessed creativity of the projects conducted. We discuss the theoretical consequences and future research directions for creative self-regulation studies.

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