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Intended persistence: comparing academic and creative challenges in high school

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Abstract

How do high school students approach academic and creative challenges? This study compares the content of academic and creative challenges for 190 high school students, and examines students’ intentions to persist. Students reported experiencing academic and creative challenges in different areas: academic challenges were described primarily in math/science and English, with themes related to time management and striving to improve, while creative challenges were described overwhelmingly in art and music and concerned problem solving difficulties. Students reported more interest and intention to persist in the creative than academic challenges. Interest was the strongest predictor of persistence across both academic and creative challenges. The divergent perceptions of creative and academic challenges suggest that capitalizing on the creative elements of academic assignments could boost student interest and subsequent persistence.

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Notes

  1. Some student responses were very brief, so additional paired samples t tests were conducted only for responses with more than 6 words to ensure that differences in response length did not skew results (first person singular pronouns, n = 97; affect, n = 97; positive emotion, n = 95; negative emotion, n = 96; cognitive mechanisms, n = 97; social, n = 95; leisure, n = 95; work, n = 94; achievement, n = 94). These analyses differed from those including all participants only in that the difference in the mean frequencies for positive emotion words was not statistically significant, t(94) = −1.85, p = .07.

  2. Students’ current achievement and hoped-for achievement in academic and creative domains were not compared, because the scales used to measure these variables were not comparable.

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Acknowledgments

The work on this paper was funded by the Botín Foundation (Emotions, Creativity and the Arts grant; Principal investigators: Zorana Ivcevic and Marc Brackett). Funding was also provided by the Brewster Academy, Wolfboro, NH.

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  1. Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, Yale University, 340 Edwards St., New Haven, CT, 06511, USA

    Jessica D. Hoffmann, Zorana Ivcevic, Gabriele Zamora, Marina Bazhydai & Marc Brackett

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  1. Jessica D. Hoffmann
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  2. Zorana Ivcevic
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Correspondence to Jessica D. Hoffmann.

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Hoffmann, J.D., Ivcevic, Z., Zamora, G. et al. Intended persistence: comparing academic and creative challenges in high school. Soc Psychol Educ 19, 793–814 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-016-9362-x

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