In recent years, education institutions have developed innovative learning and teaching methodologies by using new technologies (ICT). This led to advance massive online teaching and promote technology-enhanced learning. However, the increasing demands for skills and knowledge for using ICT, the continuous changes in learning and teaching processes and practices, and consequently the time and effort necessary to adapt and learn how to use ICTs cause technostress on teachers, especially if they do not hold appropriate coping strategies and digital proficiency. Technostress broadly reflects the incapability to adapt in a healthy way to technology requirements. The present proposal is aimed to explore if training based on creativity, which is a useful tool to decrease stress, can interact with adaptive and non-adaptive coping (cognitive emotional regulation strategies), on the one hand, and digital proficiency (self-efficacy and competences), on the other hand, in order to reduce technostress in teachers of secondary schools.
Two groups of teachers paired by age, gender, teaching experience, creativity and technostress are recruited. As regards the experimental group, teachers are trained to develop their creative potential across five consecutive weeks using a variety of tasks tapping divergent thinking, which involves the ability to find as many different and new solutions as possible to an open-ended problem. The participants are requested to practice the training approximately 20 minutes for three days (1 hour per week) for five consecutive weeks. The training is designed to be delivered online. In order to rule out possible effects due to the modality of administration, training is delivered using both the synchronous modality (at a specific time with the help of an experimenter) and the asynchronous modality (participants can practice the training anytime during the day). As regards the control group, a non-creativity training is envisaged: teachers are requested to recall lists of stimuli using both the synchronous and asynchronous modalities. For both groups, cognitive emotional regulation strategies, digital self-efficacy and digital competences are assessed only before training, whereas creativity and technostress levels are assessed both before and after training. Two hypotheses are defined. First, training is expected to enhance the positive effects of adaptive coping strategies and reduce the negative effects of non-adaptive coping strategies on technostress with respect to the control group, regardless of the modality of training delivery. Second, training is expected to increase the positive effects of digital proficiency and reduce the negative effects of the lack of digital proficiency on technostress with respect to the control group, regardless of the modality of training delivery.