Seven Questions about Creativity and Creative Thinking

Executive summary

What makes “creative ideas” creative?

Creative ideas tend to be highly appropriate, highly original and highly valuable across country-language contexts. However, judges’ appropriateness, originality and value scores don’t fully explain their overall evaluations of the creativity of students’ responses, accounting for around 66% of the variation in holistic creativity scores on average. The relative importance of appropriateness, originality and value also varies across task types, though they remain important in all contexts. Factors like task demands, constraints and difficulty affect how much each criteria determines the overall creativity of a response.

Which tasks led to more creative ideas on the PISA test?

Some of the tasks in the PISA 2022 Creative Thinking test asked students to come up with two or three ideas for a given scenario that were as different as possible. Although the task instructions did not explicitly instruct students to think of creative ideas in these tasks, around 1 in 2 students managed to come up with at least one creative idea in their response. In fact, students were more successful in thinking of creative ideas in the divergent thinking tasks than when asked to generate a single original idea, with only 1 in 4 student responses evaluated as creative in those tasks. Divergent thinking tasks can thus encourage creative idea generation and help students practice their ideation skills. Students might also need support in evaluating and selecting good ideas (i.e. convergent thinking processes) following divergent thinking.

Is creative thinking domain-specific or domain-general – or both?

The PISA 2022 Creative Thinking test included tasks situated in different domain contexts, some of which focused more on imagination (e.g. writing a story) while others focused more on solving social or scientific problems. Of the students in the PISA CT Rescoring project sample who completed at least three different tasks, only 8% on average were high-scoring (compared to their country-language peers) in three or more tasks. This finding suggests that it is quite difficult for students to be creative across all domains.

Students’ gender, socio-economic status, and mathematics and reading performance were all significantly associated with scoring highly across multiple tasks. Creative all-rounders also reported stronger attitudes and beliefs related to creativity. However, a range of other domain-specific and domain-general factors likely also contribute to supporting creative performance across different domains.

Are there cross-cultural differences in creativity and creative thinking?

Cultural norms and expectations can influence students’ capacity to engage in creative work and how people evaluate what is creative or not. Unsurprisingly, across all country-language groups in the study, students found in relatively easier to come up with appropriate ideas across tasks than original and valuable ideas. Students also consistently demonstrated a relative weakness in coming up with original ideas, which was particularly evident in some countries (like Chile or Greece). It may be that judges have higher expectations about what makes an idea original in the types of everyday imaginative and problem-solving tasks in the PISA test.

Despite students’ weaknesses in coming up with original ideas, originality scores explained the largest share of the unique variation in judges’ holistic creativity scores, on average across country-language groups – though not in all country-language groups. In Greece, Colombia, Chile, Korea, appropriateness scores instead explained the largest share of the unique variation in creativity scores. While value scores often explained more of the unique variation in judges’ scores than appropriateness scores, they rarely explained more than originality scores (only in Greece, Korea and Italy).

Patterns in idea flexibility and fixations in problem-solving tasks

In two of the problem-solving tasks included in the Rescoring study, students tended to think of similar ideas – both within and across country-language groups. In both tasks, 5 most common idea types accounted for over 60% of all student ideas, respectively. There was greater cross-cultural variability in students’ ideas in the harder scientific problem-solving task than the easier social problem-solving task.

Students were also far more likely to ignore the task constraints in the more difficult task. Students who submitted ideas that followed relatively common themes also scored higher, in terms of overall idea quality, than students who suggested ideas in more uncommon idea categories. These creative thinkers “inside the box” were more likely to be girls and socio-economically advantaged students.

Are girls really better than boys in creative thinking?

Girls consistently scored higher than boys in the PISA 2022 creative thinking tasks – across country-language groups, task types and scoring method – suggesting it is a relatively stable finding that is not driven by any single scoring method, task feature, or sample anomaly. Girls’ greater engagement with the PISA test, in general, may go some way to explain this result.

The only domain in which girls did not show a large performance advantage over boys in creative thinking is in scientific problem solving. Despite still outscoring boys in scientific problem-solving tasks, girls showed higher levels of relative disengagement than boys with the scientific problem-solving tasks and they reported far weaker creative self-efficacy in scientific or invention tasks compared to boys (despite reporting overall greater creative self-efficacy).

Does socio-economic disadvantage hinder creative thinking?

Student socio-economic status was significantly associated with their creativity scores – particularly in countries in the study with the largest within-country inequalities in socio-economic status (e.g. Colombia, Brazil and Portugal). Advantaged students scored significantly higher than disadvantaged students, both overall and in idea appropriateness, originality and value. Disadvantaged students particularly struggled relative to advantaged students in tasks asking them to generate original ideas, tasks with greater writing demands, and problem-solving tasks.

Differences in reading and mathematics proficiency between advantaged and disadvantaged student groups largely – but not totally – account for their performance differences in creative thinking. Self-efficacy beliefs also effectively moderate students’ success in creative thinking tasks in all country-language groups, and especially in scientific problem-solving tasks (on average).