Unlock your creative potential: A creativity course for cultivating creative self-efficacy among undergraduate students in Pakistan

Abstract

This four-wave longitudinal study entailed fostering creative self-efficacy among Pakistan's undergraduate students through a creativity course: Unlock Your Creative Potential. To ensure its effectiveness, the course was implemented based on various intervention best practices from educational, positive and vocational psychology. The study comprised 162 participants randomly allocated to an intervention (n = 81) and wait-list control (n = 81) group. Results of the growth curve analysis indicated that creative self-efficacy augmented at a greater rate over each time interval between the pretest and follow-up measurement 2 in the intervention group than in the control group. The analysis provided a comprehensive view of the development of creative self-efficacy in the two groups over time. There were significant variations in students' initial status (intercepts) and growth trajectories (slopes). The effect of students' initial creative self-efficacy scores indicated that those having high initial creative self-efficacy scores had a slower increase in linear growth over time than those having low initial creative self-efficacy. The qualitative component also sheds light on the effectiveness of the creativity course, as it provided insights into how participants practised creativity in their academic and personal lives during the eight months after the posttest and what sustained their belief in their creative abilities during this period. The theoretical contribution and practice implications of the findings are discussed in the paper.

Keywords

• Creative self-efficacy
• Creative thinking self-efficacy
• Creative performance self-efficacy
• Growth curve modelling