Learning Goals, Creativity and Personality

Abstract

In this article, I examine the meaningful relationships which exist between learning goals, creativity and personality. Two hundred and fifty respondents from two local universities in Singapore responded to a survey which contained various psychological scales which measured specific psychological constructs. They included task orientation, ego‐approach orientation, ego‐avoidance orientation, creativity, conformity, autonomous causality orientation, controlled causality orientation, openness to experience, agreeable‐ness and neuroticism. Task orientation was found to be positively associated with creativity, autonomous causality orientation and openness to experience, and negatively associated with conformity. Both ego‐approach and ego‐avoidance orientations were found to be positively associated with conformity, controlled causality orientation and neuroticism, and negatively associated with creativity and openness to experience. In addition, ego‐approach orientation was found to be negatively associated with agreeableness. In the discussion, it was stressed that if educators wished to nurture creative, compassionate and vivacious students who enjoyed the learning process, rather than competitive, conforming and wary students who feared the learning process, then it was necessary to cultivate a learning environment which encouraged students to be task‐involved rather than ego‐involved.