How Adolescents Develop and Implement Their Ideas? On Self-Regulation of Creative Action

Abstract

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.

Self-Regulation in Creative Learning: Agentic Perspective

“…Thus, the strategies more specific for creative self-regulation could be not captured by this instrument. While future studies may benefit from applying bettertailored measures (see, e.g., Zielińska et al, 2020), we believe that the findings of this study have an additional explanation. Creativity and learning are mutually dependent (Beghetto, 2016;: creativity influences learning, and academic learning and knowledge are beneficial for creative performance.…”

“…Indeed, people can exert control over the psychological processes involved in a creative action (Beaty et al, 2014;Benedek et al, 2014;Gilhooly et al, 2007;Zabelina et al, 2019). And those who more effectively self-regulate their thoughts and behaviors relevant for creativity are more likely to perform better in creativity tasks (Callan et al, 2019(Callan et al, , 2021 and pursue more creative projects (Zielińska et al, 2020).…”

“…The controllable aspects of both creativity and learning have been recently accentuated by researchers who take the perspective of self-regulated learning-one of the most prominent concepts in educational psychology (e.g., Panadero et al, 2017;Winne, 2018;Zimmerman, 2000)to understand the creative process (Callan et al, 2019;Ivcevic & Nusbaum, 2017;Spoon et al, 2021;Zielińska et al, 2020). It was demonstrated that people use different ways to regulate their thoughts, emotions, and behavior while engaging in creative activity or performing a creative task.…”

School Does Not Kill Creativity

“…M. Jankowska et al, 2018; Rubenstein et al, 2020). A conceptualization of creative processes in terms of self-regulated learning (Rubenstein et al, 2018) emphasizes similarities between the phases of forethought, performance, and reflection in learning and creativity (see also Zielińska et al, 2020). What’s more, these phases and the strategies identified within them (e.g., obstacles expectation, uncertainty acceptance, adjusting approach, managing goals, emotions regulation, readiness to share, and improvement approach) were found to be relevant for many different creative domains (Zielińska, Forthmann, et al, 2021).…”

Simple yet wise? Students’ creative engagement benefits from a daily intervention.

“…Fourth, the scope of our prompts was relatively narrow. Therefore, we firmly believe that future studies should examine the possibilities to support creativity using prompts that focus on creative self-beliefs and creative self-regulation (Zielińska et al, 2020; Zielińska & Karwowski, in press). Creativity is driven by top-down processes, such as executive control, and is thereby largely controllable and intentional (Benedek & Fink, 2019; Silvia, 2018).…”