Creative minds in action

What is creativity and creative thinking?

Understanding creativity

Most people have an intuitive understanding of what creativity is, but how exactly it manifests in different contexts is a matter of debate. In general, creativity results from the interaction between a person, a process and its social environment to produce a discernible product (Plucker, Beghetto and Dow, 2004[5]; Amabile, 1983[12]).

Many theories of creativity acknowledge that both internal and external factors are important for reaching creative outcomes. Componential approaches emphasise the interaction between relevant skills and knowledge, cognitive processes, personality traits, motivation and the broader environment (Amabile and Pratt, 2016[13]; Walia, 2019[14]; Kaufman and Glăveanu, 2019[15]). In other words, internal resources support an individual’s creative potential, which may lead to creative outcomes in an enabling and recognising environment (Runco, 2003[16]). While some of these internal resources may be more stable (e.g. personality traits), others are malleable by social and developmental influences (e.g. knowledge and skills, cognitive processes). In an educational context, the PISA creative thinking assessment framework identifies the internal and external factors that are important for enabling students to engage in creative work (OECD, 2023[17]).

The literature on creativity generally distinguishes between “Big C” creativity and “little c” creativity. While the former refers to great works of art or technological and scientific breakthroughs, which are supported by significant expertise and a wider recognition of value from society, all people are capable of demonstrating “little c” creativity by engaging in creative thinking (Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009[18]).

Creative thinking as the cognitive process supporting creative work

Creative thinking refers to the cognitive processes required to undertake creative work. Typically, research on the cognitive skills involved in creativity refers to both divergent and convergent thinking processes. Divergent thinking supports idea generation by enabling individuals to connect diverse pieces of information and adopt different points of view (Guilford, 1956[19]; Reiter-Palmon, Forthmann and Barbot, 2019[20]; Runco et al., 2017[21]; OECD, 2022[6]). Convergent thinking refers to the ability to apply logical and conventional reasoning to information (Zhang, Sjoerds and Hommel, 2020[22]; Guilford, 1956[19]), and it is crucial for problem-finding, identifying good ideas, and supporting idea generation through persistence (Nijstad et al., 2010[23]; De Dreu, Baas and Nijstad, 2008[24]). This process has also been referred to as convergent-integrative thinking, where several disparate ideas are brought together into a new synthesis (Lubart, Barbot and Besançon, 2019[25]). Overall, both cognitive processes are essential in different stages of the creative process, and their relative importance may vary depending on the task at hand (Baer, 2016[26]; Childs et al., 2022[8]).

Creative thinking in PISA 2022

The PISA assessment focused on measuring creative thinking as it is a malleable individual capacity that can be developed through practice. The PISA 2022 assessment framework defines creative thinking as “the competence to engage productively in the generation, evaluation and improvement of ideas that can lead to original and effective solutions, advances in knowledge and powerful expressions of imagination” (OECD, 2023[17]). The PISA test thus focuses on students’ capacity to generate and iterate upon ideas in different everyday contexts.

Understanding how creativity varies across subjects

Researchers in the field have long debated whether individuals are creative in everything they do or only in certain domains. The term ‘domain’ refers to a specific area of knowledge or practice. This domain-general vs. domain-specific debate naturally extends to creative thinking.

The first generation of creative thinking tests reflected a domain-general perspective – that a set of general and enduring attributes influence creative endeavours and that an individual’s capacity to be creative readily transfers across domains. Researchers now recognise that, to some extent, the internal resources that support creativity differ by domain and an individual’s capacity to produce creative work may thus differ across domain contexts (Baer, 2016[26]; Miravete and Tricot, 2024[27]; Baer, 2015[28]). While agreement on the number of distinct domains of creativity remains an open question, researchers tend to agree that the capacity to engage creatively in the arts, on the one hand, and in mathematics and science on the other, draws upon a different set of internal resources, knowledge, skills, and attributes (Merseal et al., 2023[29]; Evans and Jirout, 2023[30]; van Broekhoven, Cropley and Seegers, 2020[31]).

Domain specificity has important implications for education, both in terms of instruction and assessment. Different subject areas may emphasise diverse types of creative thinking and being able to think creatively may also depend on the extent to which students have acquired relevant knowledge, skills and experience in those areas. Given this, the PISA 2022 test measured students’ capacity to engage in creative thinking in four different domain contexts. Two contexts – written expression and visual expression – focused on students’ capacity to express their ideas creatively, whereas the other two contexts – social problem solving and scientific problem solving – focused on students’ capacity to apply creative thinking for a more functional purpose.