18/06/2024 - Singapore, Korea, Canada*, Australia*, New Zealand*, Estonia and Finland were the highest-performing education systems in the first-ever creative thinking assessment under the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

Results of the global assessment, administrated in 2022 to better understand skills of 15-year-old students in 64 countries and economies worldwide, show that students in high-performing education systems are not only succeeding in standardised mathematics, reading and science tests, but also in new creative thinking tests. Students were asked to think of original and diverse solutions for simple expressive tasks and familiar problems, such as coming up with an interesting story idea or thinking of different ways to conduct an awareness-raising campaign in school.

PISA 2022 Results (Volume III): Creative Minds, Creative Schools found that students from disadvantaged backgrounds scored significantly lower than other students in creative thinking, attributed to both the challenging environment many of these students live in as well as curriculums in under-resourced schools, which are often sidelining creative activities and practices.

The assessment also found that a gender gap in creative thinking exists in most education systems, with girls out-performing boys across all types of creative thinking tasks.

Performance differences between boys and girls cannot be explained solely by girls’ performance in the PISA core domains. While girls performed relatively better than boys in reading and they performed at a similar level as boys in mathematics performance, girls’ performance advantage in creative thinking remained significant in around half of all countries and economies even after accounting for reading or mathematics performance.

“In this third volume of PISA, the creative thinking competencies of students were assessed for the first time ever in 64 countries and economies. Equipping younger generations with the right skills for creativity, innovation, and digital technology adoption will be key to address the impacts and seize the opportunities of ongoing transformations – from population ageing and lagging productivity growth to the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI),” OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann said. “This assessment measures the capacity of students to generate, evaluate and improve ideas in four different areas - creative writing, visual expression, scientific problem solving and social problem solving - providing governments with data to help students and young people reach their full potential in our changing economies and societies.”

Building from the first two volumes of PISA 2022, launched in December 2023, PISA Volume III measures students’ capacity to engage in the generation, evaluation and improvement of ideas that can result in original and effective solutions.

About three quarters of students (78%) demonstrated a baseline level of creative thinking proficiency, meaning they could think of appropriate ideas for a range of tasks and begin to suggest original ideas for familiar problems. However, in 20 low-performing countries and economies, more than half of students struggled to reach this baseline level.

Overall, the results show that education systems that scored highly in creative thinking almost always performed highly in mathematics, reading and science. However, academic excellence is not a pre-requisite for students to demonstrate proficiency in creative thinking. Results show that individual students can excel in creative thinking without excelling in core academic domains.

As part of the assessment, 64 countries and economies tested students on their creative thinking abilities and carried out a questionnaire about their belief and practices concerning creativity. A further 10 countries/economies only conducted the questionnaire.

The PISA results were launched during an international conference, Learning in a Changing World: Evidence, innovation, and creative thinking in education, co-hosted by the OECD and the Yidan Prize Foundation. To watch the conference online, visit https://oe.cd/5zL.

The release of PISA Volume III comes after Volumes I and II, which focused on the skills and abilities of 15-year-old students in mathematics, reading and science in 81 OECD Member countries and partner economies.

The PISA reports, together with country analysis, summaries and data, are available at www.oecd.org/pisa.

Note to editors - The use of an asterisk (*) next to the name of a country or economy indicates issues with meeting PISA’s technical standards on sampling.

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