The Importance of Context Awareness in PISA Creativity Data

For the first time in 2022, PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) assessed creative thinking skills among 15-year-old students in 64 countries. The inclusion of measures assessing the generation and evaluation of new and diverse ideas is a welcome step, especially as PISA also includes data on academic performance. Early results from descriptive analysis indicate that girls outperform boys in creative thinking, and better socioeconomic conditions foster improved creative output. This commentary will examine whether these findings from PISA can be generalized to a broader set of countries, relying on cultural differences in creativity as well as education systems. This is to mitigate against the dangers of overgeneralizing or overinterpreting PISA creativity, resulting in the absence of context awareness. Specifically, we will discuss (a) how the characteristics of PISA nations may be systematically different from non-participating nations, along Hofstede's cultural dimensions or cultural distance metrics, (b) how PISA results can be merged with other existing country-level datasets to enrich interpretations, (c) implications of broad PISA results against the background of national-level metrics like gender gap or human development indices, and (d) future directions for valuable large-scale datasets such as PISA.