Team effectiveness in creative problem solving: Examining the role of students' motivational beliefs and task analyses in team performance

This study investigated the collective creative problem solving (CPS) processes and beliefs within a self-regulated learning (SRL) framework within a younger population, in order to further the research and provide practical advice to practitioners. Third through twelfth grade students (N = 120) competed in a creative problem-solving competition in which appraisers evaluated their creative problem-solving (e.g. teamwork, creativity, effective solution). Using a Micro-Macro Mutli-Level Modeling (MMMLM) analysis approach, this study sought to account for the multilevel nature of the data in the team-based environment in which the predictor variables were at the individual level and the outcome was at the team-level. Many of the individual forethought variables correlated (i.e. participant age, mastery experiences, creative collective efficacy, task value, and outcome expectations) with the team outcomes, and the model, including all forethought variables, explains approximately 64 % of the variance in the team score. The results also show that task value was the only forethought variable to significantly predict the team score outcome variable after accounting for the nested structure of the data.