ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.

Sec. Cognition

Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1554654

This article is part of the Research TopicCreativity and Creativity Awareness: New DirectionsView all 4 articles

Exploring creative thinking skills among 15-year-olds in countries that perform best in international educational assessments: Lessons to be learnt

Provisionally accepted
  • 1Hacettepe University, Ankara, Türkiye
  • 2University College London, London, England, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Creative thinking is increasingly becoming one of the goals of educational reforms around the 6 world. Research on creativity addresses several issues, such as developing creativity, measuring 7 creativity, conceptions of creativity, creative teaching, and teaching for creativity. The 8 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) marked a significant milestone by 9 including creative thinking as an innovation domain for the first time in 2022. The 2022 PISA 10 assessment aimed to evaluate the capacity of 15-year-old students across 64 jurisdictions to 11 engage in creative thinking, defined as the ability to generate, evaluate, and improve original and 12 diverse ideas. This paper explores the key findings of the PISA 2022 creative thinking results of 13 three high-performing jurisdictions in different parts of the world – Singapore, Canada and 14 Finland – and discusses the implications for school education. While cross-country policy 15 borrowing in education may fail to realize the hopes that some have for it, researchers, policymakers, and 16 educators can learn from other countries’ policies, contexts, and practices.

Keywords: Creative thinking skills, PISA, international educational assessments, Educational Policy, creativity awareness

Received: 02 Jan 2025; Accepted: 28 Apr 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Gelmez Burakgazi and Reiss. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Michael Reiss, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, England, United Kingdom

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