Motivation, strategies and creativity

The focus of this Issue, Issue 2, is on motivation, strategies for learning and creativity. Before overviewing the studies reported here, I would like to provide some historical perspective by acknowledging some of the seminal antecedent works in motivation, memory and strategies by researchers such Anderson (1996), Bandura (1997), Biggs (1987), Bower (1970, 1981), Deci and Ryan (1985, 2000), Dweck and Leggett (1988), Entwistle (1988), Maehr and Ames (1989), Maehr and Pintrich (1991), Nicholls (1984), and Zimmerman and Pons (1986). For creativity, the groundbreaking works of Carroll (1993), Guilford (1967) and Torrance (1981) come to mind. All these works, among others far too many to list, provide powerful theoretical and conceptual springboards for the studies reported here. History matters.

Let me turn to motivation, where we have four examples of quality research. Riener and Wagner (2022) examine non-monetary rewards such as certificates and medals in German adolescents. Employing both achievement goals and self-directed learning frameworks to identify which rewards were preferred, they reported a predominance of work avoidance rewards. However, when contextualised to mathematics improvement, ability effects emerged. Employing similar conceptual frameworks but over 32 months, Duchesne, Ratelle, and Larose (2022) explore Canadian adolescent students’ self-functioning in school using a cross-lagged design. Amongst their findings, intrinsic motivation was related to increased academic achievement, increased social anxiety and decreased disruptive behaviours, often via high mastery goals and/or performance goals.

Achievement goals in the context of test preparation are investigated by Lee and Bong (2022) who focus on Korean adolescents’ achievement goals, emotional state, behavioural control and deep and surface learning strategies 12 times across a three-day period just before examinations. Their findings highlight different patterns of relationships dependent upon the analyses (between or within persons). The only consistent pattern across these analyses sees an interesting finding of mastery predicting surface strategies The strongest relationship, negative, was for the ability approach and anxiety in the between-person analyses. Academic motivation and self-efficacy are central also to Deng et al.’s (2022) investigation of Chinese adolescents’ career development profiles. Using Latent Profile Analysis, three distinct groups were identified with the most positive career development group being more exploratory and planning for a career whilst also showing higher self-efficacy and motivational profiles.

In some of the aforementioned studies (e.g. Lee & Bong, 2022), interest has been subsumed under higher order factors but in the Clinton-Lisell (2022) study, interest is bifurcated into individual interest and situational interest. In a very timely examination of USA college students’ reading performance from different media (screens, paper), the findings show no medium effects on reading performance when individual interest is explored but situational interest was shown to be more predictive of reading performance when reading from screens.

Now let me turn to strategies. While Lee and Bong (2022) explored approaches to learning (deep, surface), Glass and Kang (2022) investigate the use of smart phones, amongst other external sources (Copy strategies) and mental retrieval (Generating strategies) for helping with homework as part of an eleven-year study of university students in the USA. In general, they found copying strategies increased across the 11 years of the study, the percentage of students who did not benefit from answering homework questions increased almost four-fold, and those who employed generating strategies outperformed the copiers in the examination.

Finally, let me focus on creativity. Kao (2022) explores Taiwanese university students’ responses to various simile and metaphor completion tasks analysing them from the perspectives of fluency and originality. In a complex design, Kao (2022) showed, among other findings, that the nature of the word pairs (conventional, novel) influenced outcomes with similes revealing higher fluency and originality scores than metaphors when novel word pairs were presented.

Each of the above studies draws out implications for educational practice and policy as well as potential future research. Importantly, we see here two studies, Clinton-Lisell (2022) and Glass and Kang (2022), examining the effects of the digital world (smart phones, screens) on motivation, interest and learning. Future research should examine such effects in more integrated, motivational, strategic, educational outcome (academic and social) studies from longitudinal perspectives.

I am confident you will appreciate the quality and contributions of these seven investigations. Many individuals have worked to bring this research to publication from the researchers themselves, our critical independent reviewers, our various editors and the staff in our office. You are all thanked sincerely for your intellectual rigour and pursuit of excellence.