2026 SSHRC Research Proposal

I am in the second year of a PhD program in Educational Studies at the University of Victoria, researching how mediated learning environments may influence and develop creative self-belief. My dissertation,

Cultivating Creative Confidence in Design Education:
Design-Based Research in the Age of GenAI,

will expand on my Master’s in Educational Technology research and professional experience using design education to support learner agency (Grey & Ivy, 2023). My expertise is supported by my Bachelor of Applied Science, a discipline inherently concerned with design, and reinforced by over thirteen years of professional experience in design, making, and process-based teaching.

Background.

We live in an increasingly technological world of convenience that captures our attention and enables us to outsource judgment and decision-making, rather than exercise agency (Marcoccia et al., 2026; Risko & Gilbert, 2016). As a result, visible outcomes, credentials, and measurable performance can become valued over the unfinished, often messy exploratory work that builds not only skill, but the belief in oneself (Bauer et al., 2025; Royalty et al., 2014; UNESCO, 2025). An educational environment that does not support desirable difficulties and exploration may limit opportunities to develop learner agency (Biesta & Tedder, 2007; Schoon, 2018).

Generative artificial intelligence (genAI) affords immediate performance through its ability to rapidly generate human-like text, code, and images (Barcaui, 2025; UNESCO, 2025), while its statistical outputs may promote cultural, linguistic, and creative homogenization (Bender et al., 2021). GenAI may expand learners’ capacity to create, but unreflective delegation of tasks may place learners in a more passive role, bypassing important cognitive experiences (Arthars et al., 2026; Barcaui, 2025; Kwan & Hung, 2025). Forms of cognitive offloading to genAI have been found to reduce capacity for meaning-making, creativity, and metacognition (Barcaui, 2025; Bauer et al., 2025; Kosmyna et al., 2025; Kwan & Hung, 2025; Marcoccia et al., 2026). Educational practices are lagging behind technological progress, often shaped more by geopolitics and capitalism than by pedagogy (UNESCO, 2025), leading some K-12 institutions to restrict mobile devices (BC Ministry of Education, 2025) and genAI (NYC Department of Education, 2026) rather than prepare learners to navigate these technologies. As genAI reshapes learning environments, cultivating learners’ confidence to generate and act on their own ideas is an increasingly vital educational goal (Arthars et al., 2026; UNESCO, 2024, 2025).

Creativity is the capacity to generate and pursue ideas amidst ambiguity (Britos Cavagnaro et al., 2025; Sawyer, 2019). It is linked to academic achievement (Gajda et al., 2017) and recognized as a core competency for navigating complex futures (Province of British Columbia, 2015). Exercising creativity is supported by creative confidence, the trust in one’s ability to be creative, a construct central to design education (Kelley & Kelley, 2013; Royalty et al., 2014). Learners with high creative confidence tend to persist through setbacks, embrace intellectual risk-taking, and transform ideas into action (Beghetto et al., 2021; Karwowski & Beghetto, 2019), while those with low creative confidence may cognitively offload tasks, deferring judgment and opportunity to develop their skill (Al-sa’di & Miller, 2026; Krajcer et al., 2026). Maizel et al. (2026) found the strongest predictor of genAI dependency to be low confidence in one’s ability to complete a task. Creative confidence is theorized to have two components: the belief in one’s creative potential, developed through past experiences, and the belief in one’s ability to solve a problem within a given context (Karwowski et al., 2019). These two components are dynamically interrelated, as successful past experiences contribute to a belief in one’s ability to engage with a new task, which may lead to a new successful experience (Habib & Gardiner, 2026; Wiśniewska & Karwowski, 2026; Zielińska et al., 2021). This dynamic shows how greater creative confidence may increase one’s willingness to engage in educational experiences (Álvarez-Huerta et al., 2021).

Creative confidence evolves over time through learners’ interconnected experiences within technological, social, and task-related conditions (Karwowski & Beghetto, 2019; Zielińska et al., 2021). While research has examined creative confidence across multiple dimensions, showing that it is shaped by social dynamics (Azkarate-Iturbe et al., 2024; Liu et al., 2023), genAI (Al-sa’di & Miller, 2026; Habib & Gardiner, 2026; Krajcer et al., 2026), and pedagogical interventions (Jackson et al., 2025; Sweeney et al., 2025), research has yet to examine how these interconnected influences interact within an integrated system. Activity theory provides a sociocultural framework for understanding human action as part of a system shaped by mediating tools, rules, community, and division of labor (Engeström, 2001; Jonassen & Rohrer-Murphy, 1999). Applying this lens can help explain why and how a learning environment may influence creative confidence in the moment and develop it over time.

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to iteratively refine a learning environment that cultivates adult learners’ creative confidence, and to understand how the environment’s mediating activity system, of tools (including genAI), relationships, and structures, shapes the development of creative confidence.

Methodology

A design-based research (DBR) approach will be used to develop and refine a learning environment that supports creative confidence (McKenney & Reeves, 2019). Learners’ self-beliefs will be examined using measures of creative confidence and situated within the broader system using activity theory. Research will occur through a Design+Build intervention, in which 5-10 participants will design and build a physical prototype addressing a community problem across four three-hour sessions of design thinking instruction and self-directed design time. The intervention will undergo iterative cycles of implementation, analysis, and redesign, where insights inform changes to the learning environment (i.e., space, technology access, social structures) to examine their effect on participants’ creative confidence. This process will continue until emerging theoretical insights become sufficiently robust. Each iteration will recruit a different group of adults through university channels, teacher education programs, and community networks. DBR is particularly relevant for researching learning environments because it develops theoretical insights within an authentic context (McKenney & Reeves, 2019).

A convergent mixed-methods approach will be used, combining quantitative measures before, during, and after the intervention using the 11-item Likert-scale Short Scale of Creative Self developed by Karwowski et al. (2018), with qualitative interviews, observations, participant reflections, and artefacts. This approach supports transferability and trustworthiness, by situating quantitative findings within their qualitative context as activity theory demands (Creswell & Creswell, 2023; Jonassen & Rohrer-Murphy, 1999). Interviews will follow Seidman’s (2019) semi-structured in-depth phenomenological format, which includes individuals’ lived experience. Thematic analysis will leverage a constructivist approach, emphasizing how experiences unfold in addition to what occurs (Roulston, 2010). Findings will undergo member-checking to support trustworthiness (Roulston, 2010), then inform successive intervention redesigns, contributing to the development of situated theory (McKenney & Reeves, 2019).

Feasibility

The success of this research is supported by substantial literature, academic and professional expertise, and a strong academic network. My experience with peer-reviewed publications, presentations, active research, and technically complex project management will contribute to the success of this research. My affiliation with the CFI-funded Technology Integration and Evaluation Lab will deepen my experience in research design, instrumentation, analysis, and advanced learning technologies while contributing to SSHRC-funded initiatives. My supervisor, Dr. Michael Paskevicius, has multinational experience in educational technology, activity theory, and digital literacies.

Impact

Findings will be disseminated at peer-reviewed conferences (e.g., CSSE, Play Make Learn), in scholarly journals (e.g., Educational Technology Research and Development), and educator accessible multimedia formats. This research aligns with SSHRC’s Emerging Global Challenges of Working in the Digital Economy, The Arts Transformed, and Humanity+ (Policy Horizons Canada, 2018). The resulting contribution is actionable knowledge for designing learning environments that support and cultivate learners’ creative confidence amid rapid technological change, a contribution uniquely enabled by my expertise across education, design, and research.

Formatted for two pages:

Granchelli, Adrian (2026) SSHRC – Research Proposal Download

Al-sa’di, A., & Miller, D. (2026). Supporting Novice Creativity in Design Education Through Human-Centred Explainable AI. Theoretical and Applied Ergonomics, 2(2), 4. https://doi.org/10.3390/tae2020004

Álvarez-Huerta, P., Muela, A., & Larrea, I. (2021). Student engagement and creative confidence beliefs in higher education. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 40, 100821. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2021.100821

Arthars, N., Yang, H., Hill, M., Liu, D., & Markauskaite, L. (2026). Young people, learning, and generative AI: A rapid literature review and implications for PreK-12 education. Barker Institute and The University of Sydney. https://barker.institute/news/young-people-learning-and-generative-ai-a-rapid-literature-review-and-implications-for-prek-12-education/

Azkarate-Iturbe, O., Álvarez-Huerta, P., Muela, A., & Larrea, I. (2024). Cooperative mindset and creative self-concept in higher education. Learning and Individual Differences, 112, 102461. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2024.102461

Barcaui, A. (2025). ChatGPT as a cognitive crutch: Evidence from a randomized controlled trial on knowledge retention. Social Sciences & Humanities Open, 12, 102287. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2025.102287

Bauer, E., Greiff, S., Graesser, A. C., Scheiter, K., & Sailer, M. (2025). Looking Beyond the Hype: Understanding the Effects of AI on Learning. Educational Psychology Review, 37(2), 45. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-025-10020-8

Beghetto, R. A., Karwowski, M., & Reiter-Palmon, R. (2021). Intellectual risk taking: A moderating link between creative confidence and creative behavior? Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 15(4), 637–644. (2020-45723-001). https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000323

Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? . Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 610–623. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Biesta, G., & Tedder, M. (2007). Agency and learning in the lifecourse: Towards an ecological perspective. Studies in the Education of Adults, 39(2), 132–149. https://doi.org/10.1080/02660830.2007.11661545

Britos Cavagnaro, L. C., Estrada-Liou, E. D., Hnatov, C. L., Ta, T., & Lichtenstein, G. (2025). Assessing the ability to navigate ambiguity: An essential skill for imagining possible futures. Possibility Studies & Society, 27538699251375151. https://doi.org/10.1177/27538699251375151

Creswell, J. W., & Creswell, J. D. (2023). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (Sixth edition, international student edition). Sage.
Engeström, Y. (2001). Expansive Learning at Work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization. Journal of Education and Work, 14(1), 133–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080020028747

Gajda, A., Karwowski, M., & Beghetto, R. A. (2017). Creativity and academic achievement: A meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(2), 269–299. (2016-40090-001). https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000133

Grey & Ivy. (2023). Spatial Agency 02. https://issuu.com/greyandivy/docs/231018_g_i_issue_02

Habib, S., & Gardiner, Z. (2026). Generative AI and creative self-efficacy: A systematic review. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 62, 102234. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2026.102234

Jackson, N., Heikkinen, K.-P., & Haapasalo, H. (2025). Personalised Creativity Development through Design Thinking. CERN IdeaSquare Journal of Experimental Innovation, 9(2), 8–22. https://doi.org/10.23726/cij.2025.1711

Jonassen, D. H., & Rohrer-Murphy, L. (1999). Activity theory as a framework for designing constructivist learning environments. Educational Technology Research and Development, 47(1), 61–79. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02299477

Karwowski, M., & Beghetto, R. A. (2019). Creative behavior as agentic action. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 13(4), 402–415. (2018-29704-001). https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000190

Karwowski, M., Han, M.-H., & Beghetto, R. A. (2019). Toward dynamizing the measurement of creative confidence beliefs. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 13(2), 193–202. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000229

Karwowski, M., Lebuda, I., & Wiśniewska, E. (2018). Measuring Creative Self-efficacy and Creative Personal Identity. The International Journal of Creativity & Problem Solving, 28(1), 45–57.

Kelley, T., & Kelley, D. (2013). Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All. Crown/Archetype.

Kosmyna, N., Hauptmann, E., Yuan, Y. T., Situ, J., Liao, X.-H., Beresnitzky, A. V., Braunstein, I., & Maes, P. (2025). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task (arXiv:2506.08872). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.08872

Krajcer, L., Schut, A., Wang, P., Quanjer, A.-J., & Gonçalves, M. (2026). The hidden costs of AI-assisted ideation: Empirical findings on ChatGPT’s impact on novice designers’ creative confidence and design process. Design Science, 12, e16. https://doi.org/10.1017/dsj.2026.10060

Kwan, L. Y. Y., & Hung, Y. S. (2025). Does AI Usage Diminish Human Creativity?: How Goal Orientation Theory Moderates the Negative Effects Between AI Usage and Creative Output. Social Science Computer Review, 08944393251389125. https://doi.org/10.1177/08944393251389125

Liu, Y.-L. E., Lee, T.-P., & Huang, Y.-M. (2023). Enhancing university students’ creative confidence, learning motivation, and team creative performance in design thinking using a digital visual collaborative environment. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 50, 101388. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2023.101388

Maizel, H., Kalman Halevi, M., Sarid, M., & Tutian, R. (2026). Understanding Student Dependency on AI: The Role of AI Literacy, Academic Self-Efficacy, and Resource Management Strategies. Education Sciences, 16(7), 1123. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci16071123

Marcoccia, C., Quattrociocchi, W., & Capraro, V. (2026). AI advice suppresses people’s willingness to say “I don’t know”, even when the advice is wrong and accuracy is incentivized (5y6m4_v1). PsyArXiv. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5y6m4_v1/

McKenney, S. E., & Reeves, T. C. (2019). Conducting educational design research (Second edition). Routledge.

Ministry of Education and Child Care. (2025). Personal Digital Device (Cell Phone) Restrictions in Schools. Province of British Columbia. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/education-training/k-12/administration/legislation-policy/public-schools/personal-digital-device-restrictions-in-schools

New York City Department of Education. (2026). Guidance on Artificial Intelligence and Screen Time. New York City Public Schools. https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/policies/guidance-on-artificial-intelligence

Policy Horizons Canada. (2018). The Next Generation of Emerging Global Challenges. https://horizons.service.canada.ca/resources/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/SSHRC-Emerging-Global-Challenges-ENG-Web-New-1.pdf

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Risko, E. F., & Gilbert, S. J. (2016). Cognitive Offloading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(9), 676–688. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.07.002

Roulston, K. (2010). Reflective interviewing: A guide to theory and practice. Sage.

Royalty, A., Oishi, L. N., & Roth, B. (2014). Acting with Creative Confidence: Developing a Creative Agency Assessment Tool. In L. Leifer, H. Plattner, & C. Meinel (Eds.), Design Thinking Research (pp. 79–96). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01303-9_6

Sawyer, R. K. (2019). The role of failure in learning how to create in art and design. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 33, 100527. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2018.08.002

Schoon, I. (2018). Conceptualising Learner Agency: A SocioEcological Developmental Approach, (LLAKES Research Paper 64). Centre for Learning and Life Chances in Knowledge Economies and Societies, UCL Institute of Education.

Seidman, I. (2019). Interviewing as qualitative research: A guide for researchers in education and the social sciences (Fifth edition). Teachers College Press.

Sweeney, A., Burke, J., & Meehan, T. (2025). The impact of mindful pedagogy on creativity in higher education students, a systematic review. International Journal of Educational Research Open, 9, 100504. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedro.2025.100504

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UNESCO. (2025). AI and the future of education: Disruptions, dilemmas and directions. https://doi.org/10.54675/KECK1261

Wiśniewska, E., & Karwowski, M. (2026). On the cognitive, metacognitive, and agentic effects of creativity training. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 59, 101968. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2025.101968

Wojtycka, L., Zielińska, A., & Karwowski, M. (2026). How cognition and metacognition interact in explaining creative confidence. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 60, 102122. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2025.102122

Zielińska, A., Lebuda, I., Jankowska, D. M., & Karwowski, M. (2021). Self-Regulation in Creative Learning: Agentic Perspective. Creativity. Theories – Research – Applications, 8(1), 52–71. https://doi.org/10.2478/ctra-2021-0005

Adrian Granchelli

Background.

Purpose

Methodology

Feasibility

Impact

References