Files
Abstract
An extensive body of research examined the role creative self-beliefs play in creativity and found low to moderate positive correlations between the two. The inconsistency of findings might reflect the lack of agreement on defining and measuring creative self-beliefs and reliance on divergent thinking tasks as measures of creativity. Researchers advocate for using domain-specific measures of creativity and tailoring creative self-efficacy scales to specific contexts. Skill levels have been found to affect creative performance as well as creative confidence; however, the relationship between expertise, creative self-beliefs, and creative performance is a neglected area of research. Through three empirical studies, the present dissertation explored the influence of expertise, stable and dynamic creative confidence on creative problem-solving in chess. Chess studies of creativity have unique advantages due to the sophisticated measurement scale of expertise and well-controlled environment. The first study aimed to develop and validate a scale of Chess Creative Self-Efficacy. The goal of the second study was to develop and validate the Chess Creativity Scale. The last study explored the influence of expertise, stable and dynamic creative self-beliefs on creative problem-solving in chess. The findings have demonstrated good psychometric qualities of both Chess Creative Self-Efficacy and Chess Creativity scales based on Many-facet Rasch model analysis. Stable creative self-beliefs were found to affect pre-task creative confidence which in turn predicted chess creativity. Expertise and pre-task confidence in finding an original solution explained the unique proportion of variance in chess creativity scores.