Investigation of the relationship between creative personality traits and academic motivation of teacher candidates for instructional technologies course

The materials used in learning environments are of great importance in students' processes of constructing knowledge. The variety of materials that teachers develop in their lessons by taking individual differences into account is important in the learning processes of students. Teachers who are expected to develop creative and diverse materials take the Instructional Technologies course, which is one of the teaching professional knowledge courses given in the Faculty of Education, during their undergraduate education. With this course, they are expected to gain competencies to develop materials. At the same time, it is important to determine the relationship between the academic motivation of prospective teachers who are expected to develop creative materials in this course and their creative personality traits. The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between pre-service teachers' creative personality traits and their academic motivation towards instructional technology course. This research was designed in the relational survey model, which is one of the quantitative research methods. Disproportionate element sampling method was used as sampling method. For this research, a total of 470 pre-service teachers in the second, third and fourth graders who have taken or are taking instructional technology courses in different departments were reached. Personal information form, creative personality traits scale and academic motivation scale were used as data collection tools. Since the data were not normally distributed, nonparametric tests were applied to examine the relationship between variables and scales according to the results. According to the findings obtained, it was concluded that the levels of creative personality traits of pre-service teachers were at a high level above the average according to the findings obtained. Academic motivation levels were found to be high. When analyzed with the determined variables, it was found that there were some differences and there were no differences in some of them. It was revealed that there was a positive and low level significant relationship between creative personality traits and academic motivation of pre-service teachers. The results were discussed with the literature and suggestions were made.