Does Self-efficacy Matter? On the Correlation of Self-efficacy and Creativity in IT Education

Self-efficacy belief affects humans in life, action and work. Higher self-efficacy enables stronger contribution in fulfilling tasks, helping others in a team, and survive when facing obstacles and failures. Also creativity correlates to higher self-efficacy. At the same time, design is a powerful skill in note-making, improving the student's understanding of the undergoing topic in a class. Note-making, when consisting of recorded writings, self-drawn images and other supportive subjects like structural analyses, charts, ad-hoc notes, detailed features and verbal links to related themes, forms a fundamental skill and ability in learning and applying new motifs and patterns. We executed during a design class an experiment with 22 students from various faculties at two universities by designing and creating visual notebooks. The students acted as designers and visualizers communicating to themselves and their teams with own creations. These notebooks were analyzed and reflected against the questionnaire results to evaluate the impact of the course in the progress in design skills and creativity.