Creative metacognition and self-ratings of creative performance: A 4-C perspective

Abstract

Creative metacognition (CMC) refers to a combination of self- and contextual-knowledge used to make decisions about one's own creative efforts and accomplishments. Competent creators use CMC to judge whether their contributions might be considered creative. Do novice creators have the ability estimate their own level of creativity? The purpose of this study was to examine this question. Specifically, this article reports on an exploratory study that examined whether elementary students' domain specific mini-c and little-c self-ratings aligned with external ratings of creativity. Students (N=242) completed three performance tasks (i.e., a visual, verbal, and scientific task). Immediately following each task, students were asked to judge whether their resulting product was creative at the mini-c level (i.e., creative to the self, but not others) and little-c level (i.e., recognized as creative by others). External raters also scored the creativity of each completed task. Results indicate that students were able to differentiate their performance on different creative domains (i.e., visual, verbal, scientific) and across levels of quality (i.e., mini-c and little-c). In addition, their self-ratings were also predictive of creativity scores as assigned by expert raters. The specific patterns of the relationships between students' self-ratings and creativity are discussed and implications for subsequent research are provided.