Paper summary - Motivation for Creativity in Design Students, by Shulamith Kreitler and Hernan Casakin

What I read

In this paper, the authors describe a study intended to see if the four aspects of motivation (goals, norms, oneself and reality) can predict creative abilities. They conclude that these aspects of motivation can predict creative abilities.

First, the authors describe that the study of motivation in creativity has become increasingly relevant, as researchers see motivation as a very important part of being successfully creative. They separate motivation into four categories: intrinsic, extrinsic, both intrinsic and extrinsic, and unconscious—that creativity is “as an attempt to solve a personal problem that is mostly unconscious, such as satisfying a repressed need, or resolving an unconscious conflict.” They indicate that the intrinsic category has grown in definition over time, and they feel that it has become so broad as to contain anything (and is therefore not useful). This indicates that a theoretical framework could help refine this overly broad definition of motivation.

The authors explain that they will use the cognitive orientation theory to explore motivation; the “major tenet of the CO theory is that outputs are a function of a motivational disposition and a performance plan.” They further unpack motivational disposition, hierarchically:

• Cognitive orientation is made up of motivational disposition.
• Motivational disposition is made up of a “product of cognitive contents and processes, elaborated in a series of steps, focused sequentially on identifying the input and elaborating its meaning,” with a focus on directionality and strength.”
• Directionality “reflects the activity toward which the motivational disposition is oriented,” and is made up of beliefs about form and contents.
• Form is made up of four beliefs: about self, goals, norms, and “general.”
• Contents is made up of the beliefs “that refer to meanings underlying the specific activity in question.”
• The meaning in question is identified by the cognitive orientation; the meanings are called themes.

The authors describe that a questionnaire (the COQ-CR) exists to judge motivational disposition. The questionnaire is a combination of the four beliefs, and the themes. The questionnaire produces scores for the four beliefs, and scores for the themes. The goal of the questionnaire is to understand things that are unconscious, non-voluntary, and not rational. This questionnaire will be used in the study to understand the motivations of architecture students. The primary hypothesis of the study is that the COQ-CR (the four beliefs) would predict the aspects of creativity, and the design would be better predicted than the process of designing.

Next, the authors describe the method of the study, which included 52 architecture students. The students were asked to design a new building, and the requirements of the building were provided. They were given two hours to design the buildings. After completing the design, they were given two questionnaires to complete. The first (the survey of attitudes) contained 33 items about designing, which came from interviews of 20 students; for example, a question was “I have tried to include in the design aspects and functions that I have not been explicitly asked to include,” and participants selected from very true to not at all true. The second questionnaire (the questionnaire about designing) included 6 questions, which were “relevant for the present study.” Two weeks after completing the design activity, the students then completed a third questionnaire (the COQ-CR), which presented 384 questions about beliefs about self, beliefs about norms, beliefs about goals, and general beliefs. The items referred to 79 themes, which came from interviews. The themes formed 11 groups.

The buildings that were designed were evaluated by four architects, who rated the designs from 1-5.

15 variables for creativity were then defined “on the basis of the students’ assessments and evaluations.” This list included creative features of the designs, which includes fluency, flexibility, elaboration and originality, and four other variables.

The authors then explain the analysis, which I will skip because, while I understand the statistical methodology, I don’t understand what they actually did, at all.

Finally, the authors describe their findings from the study; “The main result of the study is that, as expected, the four belief types enabled predictions of most of the dependent variables assessing different aspects of creativity.” They indicate that this means the measures of motivation that use cognitive orientation can predict creativity. They also describe that “The findings show that the CO measure of motivation for creativity is potentially indicative of motivational components for creativity.”

What I learned and what I think

This paper makes no sense. I haven’t been this intellectually frustrated in a long time.

I took a little bit to reflect on why it makes me so frustrated.

I think this bothers me so much because it reinforces the idea that academia is living in a completely bizzarro world, and that academic knowledge production is busted. If I were a “lay person” and I read this, or saw any of it, or someone tried to explain it to me, my reaction would be that it was a massive waste of time and effort, and this reaction would probably build or reinforce the idea that I’m working really hard at my “lay person job” (oof, what a dumb phrase), while you are just screwing around, and getting paid for it.

It also bothers me because it’s another one of these Robin Williams effects. Creativity is magical. This has essentially reduced it to a science. It literally isn’t one.

In more detail…

The initial research space seemed to be to better understand what “intrinsic motivation” means as a driver for creativity. That’s a good idea, because I observe design students often floundering based on their own reflections of their own skills, interests, and passions. The output of the study is that:

“ The main result of the study is that, as expected, the four belief types enabled predictions of most of the dependent variables assessing different aspects of creativity… as expected, the four CO belief types predicted more of the basic set variables, referring to the design features, than of the additional variables, referring to the designing processes. The findings show that the measure of motivation for creativity anchored in the CO theory has predictive power in regard to a broad range of variables reflecting creativity.”

If I try to explain that in plain language, I think but am not confident, that they are saying that students’ beliefs about self, goals, norms, and “general” predicted if they were creative or not, and since those beliefs emerged from a named theory (cognitive orientation) that is about motivation, this theory is a valuable tool for examining a student’s beliefs and then predicting if they are creative or not.

And maybe in more plain language, if you ask students to tell you what they believe about self, goals, norms and “general”, you’ll know if they are creative.

What.

I have extremely low confidence that I understand any of this, but if that’s even remotely right, that makes exactly no sense. “How do you feel about norms?” “I feel good.” “OK, you are creative.” Fine, that’s a really obtuse take on the method, but that’s because the method is either impossible, or is hidden in such poor description as to be impossible, or was so convoluted that it’s impossible.

I’ll try, generously, to see if I can describe and therefore understand the way we went from beginning to end, ignoring the crazy statistical magic done in the middle.

A quick deviation: I went back to the beginning and noticed: CO theory was developed by the authors of the paper. I almost want to give up right now. Must persevere.

• The things we do are based on motivation and planning.
• Motivation is based on different beliefs that someone holds about themselves, their goals, societal norms, and “general.”
• Motivation can be measured through a questionnaire, that asks people questions about those beliefs and questions about the topic being studied. The questions about the topic being studied are unique to the topic.
• A questionnaire of 384 items was built to study motivation of architecture students. The questions about the topic came from interviews with creative people; there were 11 groupings of questions, and 15 total questions.
• Architecture students designed a building. They also completed this questionnaire, and two others.
• Practicing architects graded the creativity of the buildings that the students designed.
• A great deal of statistical analysis was performed to identify correlation between the questionnaire responses and the creativity grading.
• It was concluded that the questionnaire responses were predictive of creativity.
• Because the questionnaire measured intrinsic motivation, the questionnaire as a tool is effective in measuring intrinsic motivation.

So…

• The method that the authors designed identified four groupings of beliefs, one of which is “general,” which means it can include anything.
• The main questionnaire tool is based on these beliefs combined with unique questions that appear to have been entirely made up (the paper references interviews, but never explains which interviews.)
• Three questionnaires were used. Two had no purpose.
• 384 questions were asked of students. I’m sure they took none of it seriously.
• A building was designed in 2 hours.
• Both freshmen who have no idea what they are doing, and seniors who know how to design buildings, and everyone in between participated.
• Four architects gave them a single grade that covers the creativity of the whole building design, with no description of what creativity meant to the architects.
• Conclusions were drawn, that the method the authors designed is a good method.
• The paper was published in the peer reviewed Creativity Research Journal.

How about this: when people lack motivation for doing things, they don’t do a good job. Great, I just saved everyone a lot of time.

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I’m sensing a pattern in my reflections, and in myself: I don’t think a lot of what I’m reading is any good. If everything is wrong, it probably means I’m wrong, so I think I need to focus on cup half full from now on. Or at least try.