Metacognitively aware university students exhibit higher creativity and motivation to learn

The relationship between metacognition and intrinsic motivation and the relationship between intrinsic motivation and creativity are well established in the current research. However, little is known about the role of metacognition in extrinsic motivation and the results of correlational analyses between metacognition and creative outcomes are often contradictory. The aim of the present study was to explore the differences in learning motivation and creativity between students with different levels of metacognitive awareness. Three hundred and eighty-one university students completed the metacognitive awareness inventory (MAI) and academic motivation scale (AMS-C28), and performed four verbal creativity tasks (product improvement task, consequences task, unusual uses, and similarities test). A non-hierarchical cluster analysis identified two specific groups of participants based on their metacognitive awareness; students with higher levels (40,4% of participants) and lower levels (59,6% of participants) of reported metacognitive awareness. Students with higher levels of metacognitive awareness were more intrinsically and extrinsically motivated to learn and exhibited less amotivation (with a large effect size, ηp2 = 0.21). Moreover, the metacognitively aware students achieved higher overall scores in creative thinking tasks (with a small effect size, ηp2 = 0.03). The subsequent analyses of the individual creativity tasks identified significant differences in the product improvement task and similarities test, but not the consequences and unusual uses tasks.