Envisioning the Future of Creative Thinking Assessment

Abstract

The PISA assessment 2022 of creative thinking was a moonshot effort that introduced significant advancements over existing creativity tests, including a broad range of domains (written, visual, social, and scientific), implementation in many languages, and sophisticated scoring methods. PISA 2022 demonstrated the general feasibility of assessing creative thinking ability comprehensively at an international scale. However, the complexity of its assessment approach—such as time-consuming scoring requiring human raters—implies the risk that it may not be easily applied by the scientific community and practitioners. In this commentary, we outline important next steps building on the PISA assessment to further enhance future assessments of creative thinking. Crucial future directions include 1) determining what tasks and scorings ensure high psychometric quality including content validity, 2) enabling efficient, objective scoring by applying AI methods such as Large Language Models (LLMs), 3) ensuring high language accessibility via multilingual tests, 4) targeting a broader age group, and 5) facilitating standardized, reproducible assessments via an open online testing platform. In sum, these developments would lead to an efficient, validated multilingual test of creative thinking, which enhances the accessibility of effective creative thinking assessments and thereby supports the democratization and reproducibility of creativity research.