For some time, it was said that the data from international assessments such as PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS overlooked fundamental aspects of children and young people's education, such as the ability to collaborate in teams, critical thinking and creativity.
These international surveys, however, include questions that allow for piecemeal conclusions about young people's abilities or skills. As these topics are certainly more fluid and controversial, the answers are less conclusive and open the way to speculation.
Many people have conjectured, for example, that the best-placed countries in PISA, namely the countries of South-East Asia, would have a less creative education and their students might perform better in calculus and science, but would not be able to compete with Westerners in creativity.
It is a very common idea that knowledge and study of mathematics and scientific subjects does not develop critical thinking and creativity. On the contrary, the intensive, demanding and systematic study of the most academically rigorous schools would kill the imagination.
This is a misconception, however. We now know that critical thinking, teamwork, creativity and other so-called soft skills are developed on the basis of knowledge. You can't be critical of topics you don't know nothing about, you can't work in a team without clear objectives, you can't be creative in a vacuum.
The main domains of the PISA 2022 study were reading, mathematics and science, as has been the case since 2006. And it added an area, as has also been the case since then, on a rotating basis. This time it was creativity. Students were asked to draw pictures using their imagination, create dialogues from made-up stories, construct plausible explanations for observations in landscapes, invent titles for illustrations and complete other creative activities.
The conclusions of this part of the survey have now been released. There are some very interesting results. The most interesting, perhaps, was the high correlation that was found between the quality of the mathematical performance of a country's students and their degree of creativity. This is shown in the graph below. In each country, there is also a high correlation between the two performances.
After all, to think outside the box, it's good to have knowledge of the box!
In the 2022 cycle, PISA defines creative thinking as the ability to generate, evaluate and refine ideas in order to produce original and effective solutions, advance knowledge and create striking expressions of the imagination. Associated with the concept of creativity, creative thinking focuses, however, on the cognitive processes that are essential in creative work - it is therefore an ability that can be shaped with practice and does not depend on social validation of the results.
This PISA definition reflects the types of creative thinking that it is reasonable for a 15-year-old student anywhere in the world to be able to demonstrate in everyday life. It emphasizes the importance of students learning to develop various ideas, and ideas that are creative, and to refine them until a satisfactory result is achieved.
The PISA 2022 creative thinking test has therefore been designed to assess these three dimensions of creative thinking in four concrete domains: written expression, visual expression, social problem solving and scientific problem solving.