Creative Thinking

PISA 2022 Creative Thinking

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The PISA 2022 Creative Thinking assessment measures students’ capacity to engage productively in the generation, evaluation and improvement of ideas that can result in original and effective solutions, advances in knowledge, and impactful expressions of imagination.

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About

What is Creative Thinking?

Creative thinking is the way of thinking that leads to the generation of valuable and original ideas. All people are capable of engaging in creative thinking and practicing ‘everyday’ creativity (addressing everyday activities in a non-conventional way). Creative thinking can be applied not only to contexts related to the expression of imagination, such as creative writing or the arts, but also to other areas where the generation of ideas is functional to the investigation of issues, problems or society-wide concerns.

The PISA assessment will examine students’ capacities to generate diverse and original ideas, and to evaluate and improve ideas, across a range of contexts or ‘domains’. The assessment includes four domains: written expression, visual expression, social problem solving and scientific problem solving. In each of these domains, students engage with open tasks that have no single correct response. They are either asked to provide multiple, distinct responses, or to generate a response that is not conventional. These responses can take the form of a solution to a problem, of a creative text or of a visual artefact.

Why is it important for students to develop Creative Thinking?

Creative thinking can have a positive influence on students’ academic interest and achievement, identity and socio-emotional development by supporting the interpretation of experiences, actions and events in novel and personally meaningful ways.

Beyond the classroom, creative thinking can help students adapt to a constantly and rapidly changing world. Supporting students’ creative thinking can help them to contribute to the development of the society they live in, today and as future workers: organisations and societies around the world increasingly depend on innovation and knowledge creation to address emerging and complex challenges, giving urgency to innovation and creative thinking as collective enterprises.

*PISA participating countries decided to postpone the PISA 2021 assessment to 2022 to reflect COVID difficulties.

Innovation

What is innovative about the PISA 2022 Creative Thinking assessment?

The PISA 2022 Creative Thinking assessment introduces several methodological innovations:

The assessment includes new, interactive item-types based on a visual design tool. For the first time in PISA, some items will require students to produce a visual artefact, rather than construct a written response or choose the correct answer.
The assessment only includes open-ended tasks with no single solution but multiple correct responses. This in turn has demanded more complex scoring methods, based on rubrics and sample responses that were informed by the collection and analysis of responses of many students around the world.

Results and supporting documents

Results

The worldwide launch of the PISA 2022 Creative Thinking results will be held in 2024. More details on the launch to come.

Assessment framework and instruments

Additional resources

Supporting documents

*NEW* SUPPORTING STUDENTS TO THINK CREATIVELY - WHAT EDUCATION POLICY CAN DO. This publication analyses how education systems worldwide are supporting the inclusion of creative thinking in different areas of education policy, including curricula, assessment, teacher training and learning environments. It is based on responses to an online questionnaire from 90 jurisdictions participating in PISA 2022. Key findings include how creative thinking is increasingly incorporated into curricula around the world, the main challenges of integrating creative thinking and gaps in system-level guidelines and assessment. Read the report to find out more!

FOSTERING STUDENTS' CREATIVITY AND CRITICAL THINKING: WHAT IT MEANS IN SCHOOL, Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (2019)

“TEACHING CREATIVE THINKING IN SCHOOLS - PISA 2021 WILL OFFER SOME CLUES”, Sarah Bouchie, Vice-President for Global Programmes, LEGO Foundation

Webinars

How are education policies supporting students to think creatively?

Assessing Creative Thinking: What, why and how?

Unleashing potential: Rethinking assessment for 21st century learning

Contact us

For more information, reach out to the PISA innovative assessments team at edu.pisainnovation@oecd.org.