PISA 2022 Creative Thinking Assessment: Opportunities, Challenges, and Cautions

Abstract

The OECD's PISA program assesses 15-year-old students globally in key competencies every 3 years, providing influential data on education quality and spurring policy debates. In the latest cycle, the innovation domain focused on creative thinking, assessing over 140,000 students across 60+ countries, in the largest study of adolescent creativity to date. This innovation domain included a cognitive test covering multiple creative thinking processes (generating creative ideas, generating diverse ideas, and evaluating/improving ideas) and creativity domains (written expression, visual expression, social problem-solving, and scientific problem-solving), as well as an extensive survey on factors influencing creativity (such as openness, creative self-efficacy, or growth mindset). While this dataset offers unprecedented research opportunities due to its scale and international scope, challenges arise from its aggregated scoring and complex sampling design. Missteps in using this data in secondary analyses could lead to fragmented and inconsistent findings. This paper provides an overview of the PISA 2022 creative thinking assessment's framework, methods, and findings, highlighting both the potential and the caution needed for impactful creativity research.