The project explores new approaches to equip people with the skills required for innovation and to support radical innovation and continuous improvement in education systems.

Creativity and critical thinking are key skills for the complex and globalized economies and societies of the 21st century. There is a growing consensus that education systems and institutions should cultivate these skills with their students. However, too little is known about what this means for everyday teaching and assessment practices.

This project at the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) aims to support education institutions to innovate in their teaching and nurture students’ creative and critical thinking.

The project builds an international community of practice around teaching, learning and assessing creativity and critical thinking. It seeks to identify the key contextual factors and effective approaches to foster these skills in education settings, develop and implement example instructional practices and assess the effects of innovative pedagogies on students and educators

.The project works across primary, secondary and higher education. It includes a strong focus on initial teacher education and continuing professional learning. 

Networks of institutions and educators experience professional learning and change their teaching to more explicitly develop students’ creativity and critical thinking along with disciplinary content and skills.

This redesign of teaching relies on a shared definition of creativity and critical thinking made visible through a common international rubric. Beyond this common goal, institutions and educators preserve full pedagogical freedom.

The OECD developed a monitoring system to assess the impact of re-designed teaching using both quantitative and qualitative data. Questionnaires were designed to measure the progression of related skills, beliefs and attitudes.

Questionnaires are also administered to control groups for comparison and to better evaluate the outcomes of the pedagogical changes. Qualitative data collection based on interviews, focus groups and observations, complements the quantitative data to provide comprehensive evidence of the effects of the different pedagogies tested.

• Brazil
• France
• Hungary
• India
• The Netherlands
• Slovak Republic
• Spain
• Thailand
• United States
• United Kingdom (Wales)

• Monash University - Australia                            
• Ontario Tech University - Canada
• McGill University - Canada
• University College Copenhagen - Denmark
• Aalto University - Finland
• NISE (University of Limerick + Mary Immaculate College) - Ireland
• Politecnico di Torino - Italy
• Sophia University - Japan
• International Christian University - Japan
• KEDI (national coordinator) - Korea
• Universidad de Guadalajara - Mexico
• Universidad Pedagogica Nacional - Mexico
• Shanghai Normal University - People's Republic of China
• Northeast Normal University - People's Republic of China
• Central China Normal University - People's Republic of China
• Escola Superior de Saude de Santa Maria - Portugal
• Instituto Politécnico de Viana do Castelo - Portugal 
• Tecnico Lisboa (Lisbon University) - Portugal
• Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias - Portugal
• University of Porto - Portugal
• Universidade de Aveiro - Portugal
• Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro - Portugal
• Politecnico de Leiria - Portugal 
• Universidad Camilo Jose Cela - Spain
• University of Winchester - United Kingdom

Class friendly assessment rubric creativity (available in spanish/español)

Class friendly assessment rubric critical-thinking (available in spanish/español)

This professional learning framework offers professional learning activities to help teachers, institutional leaders and policy-makers consider what planning, teaching, assessment and school practices can support students to develop creativity and critical thinking as part of subject learning. It provides a flexible framework, with separate modules on creativity and critical thinking, which can be adapted and implemented to address the needs of local contexts, participants, disciplines, and education levels according to the time and resources available.

The app brings together the pedagogical resources developed in the primary and secondary phase of the project with the aim of supporting changes in teaching and learning.

Please register as a teacher to ensure you have access to all resources (whatever your status).

What are the key elements of creativity and critical thinking? What pedagogical strategies and approaches can teachers adopt to foster them? How can school leaders support teachers' professional learning? To what extent did teachers participating in the project change their teaching methods? How can we know whether it works and for whom? These are some of the questions addressed in this book, which reports on the outputs and lessons of this international project.

In an age of innovation and digitalization, creativity has become one of the most valued skills in the labor market. This brief shows how policymakers and teachers can empower students to innovate and improve their education by developing students creativity.

by Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin

Critical thinking has become key to the skill set that people should develop not only to have better prospects in the labor market, but also a better personal and civic life. This brief shows how policymakers and teachers can help students develop their critical thinking skills. First, this brief defines critical thinking skills. Then, the brief shows how the concept can be translated into teacher-friendly rubrics to support them to design or redesign better lessons but also to assess their students.

by Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin

Do girls and boys report different feelings during teaching and learning for creativity and critical thinking? This document highlights differences between the emotions reported by male and female secondary students in a project about fostering creativity and critical thinking run by the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation at the OECD.

The paper suggests a theoretical underpinning for defining and assessing creativity along with a number of practical suggestions as to how creativity can be developed and tracked in schools. 

by Bill Lucas, Guy Claxton and Ellen Spencer

This paper presents the research protocol of the project of school-based assessment of creative and critical thinking skills of the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI). 

by Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin

This scoping review examines the effectiveness of online and blended learning in fostering higher-order thinking skills in higher education, focussing on creativity and critical thinking. The paper finds that whilst there is a growing body of research in this area, its scope and generalisability remain limited. Current evidence suggests that, for most students and contexts, in-person learning yields better or equivalent outcomes for higher-order thinking skills than fully online learning. However, blended and flipped learning show promise. In some cases, they may be more effective than in-person learning to develop higher-order skills. 

by Cassie Hague

This paper reviews existing policies and practices relating to the assessment of students’ creativity and critical thinking skills in higher education across OECD countries. Creativity and critical thinking are largely emphasised in policy orientations and qualification standards governing higher education in many countries. In contrast, these skills are sparsely integrated into the dimensions of centralised assessments administered at the level of systems. 

by Mathias Bouckaert

This paper focuses on ways in which students’ creativity and critical thinking can be fostered in higher education by contextualising such efforts within the broader framework of academics’ professional learning.

by Alenoush Saroyan

There is a discernible and growing gap between the qualifications that a university degree certifies and the actual generic, 21st-century skills with which students graduate from higher education. By generic skills, it is meant literacy and critical thinking skills encompassing problem solving, analytic reasoning and communications competency. As automation takes over non- and lower-cognitive tasks in today’s workplace, these generic skills are especially valued but a tertiary degree is a poor indicator of skills level.