Why children need creativity
Teaching and measuring creative thinking is a challenge but creativity is an important skill
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Creative thinking is a valuable skill for children to develop. “Young people need to deal with an uncertain world,” says Bill Lucas, Professor of Learning at the University of Winchester. “They need to be able to come up with ideas and to critique and improve those ideas.”
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) tried to find out how well children have picked up this skill by adding a new Creative Thinking component to the PISA test. This test is administered every few years to 15-year-olds in different countries. Besides mathematics, science, and reading, the PISA test also assesses interdisciplinary topics such as collaborative problem solving – and now creative thinking as well. But developing a test for creative thinking was no easy task.
Being creative is difficult to assess
Measuring creativity isn’t as straightforward as a multiple-choice quiz. “Often there isn’t one right answer,” says Lucas, who chaired the advisory committee that developed the new component of the test. “That is why creativity testing is so difficult.”
“Measuring creativity isn’t as straightforward as a multiple-choice quiz.”
There is also no single type of creativity. Designers, scientists, artists, teachers, and city planners are all creative in their own ways. “People have so many different perspectives on creativity,” says Mark Runco, Director of Creativity Research and Programming at Southern Oregon University. That makes it very difficult to measure as well.
When researchers need to measure creativity quickly, they often use “divergent thinking” tests, asking people to come up with as many ideas as possible in a short time. For example, how many different uses can you think of for a paper clip in one minute? It can hold papers, but it can also be used to fix a necklace, or to take the SIM card out of your phone, and it can have many other purposes.
But there is more to creativity. “If you think about creativity as it occurs in the natural environment, there are other things involved besides divergent thinking,” says Runco.
“If you want to assess people’s creativity, look at what they do.”
John Baer
That is why John Baer, Professor of Educational Psychology at Rider University, prefers a different way of measuring creative potential. “If you want to assess people’s creativity, look at what they do,” he says. That’s essentially how art competitions work: artists submit work, and a panel of experts assess what they made.
The PISA Creative Thinking component took a similar approach in some parts of the test, but with a twist. Rather than simply asking students to create art, the questions were closely linked to science. In one task, students were asked to design a science fair poster; in another they had to come up with captions for a comic about space.
Other questions required divergent thinking, but these were also designed to be more like real problems they might encounter. For example, instead of uses of a paperclip, one question asked students for two different explanations for a scientific observation. A third set of questions asked students to evaluate and build on existing creative ideas — as they might when working on a team project.
The questions were designed to capture different domains of creativity: creativity in writing, visual creativity, social problem solving, and scientific problem solving.
“We wanted to show that creativity is a ubiquitous idea,” says Lucas. “You can be creative in any domain of your life.” If someone is creative in one domain, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re creative in another domain. For example, some students might be very good at designing science fair posters, demonstrating visual creativity, but not so good at writing comic captions.
“The PISA test scores these sections differently and reports them separately, so that’s a big advance over tests that try to find one measure of creativity,” says Baer.
Creativity in the classroom
The OECD published the results of the PISA Creative Thinking component in 2024. Even though more than 80 countries took part in the science, mathematics, and reading sections of the PISA test, only 64 also opted to take the new Creative Thinking component. Still, 140,000 students took the test and that makes it the largest international measurement of creative thinking among this age group. “That sample size is very impressive,” says Runco.
The sheer scale of the study made it possible to find out which factors influence creativity. For example, girls tended to outperform boys across all types of questions on the creativity test. But also, students performed better if they think that creativity is something they can change, and if their teachers value creativity.
“Students performed better if they think that creativity is something they can change, and if their teachers value creativity. “
Students from Singapore scored best on the creative thinking component of the test, followed by Korea. There were slight differences in how students performed in different domains of creativity, with the Korean students outperforming everyone else in the scientific problem solving questions. Other countries in the top 5 were Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “Most of the countries that did really well have organized their curricula so that they’re not just thinking about subject silos,” says Lucas. That means that they’ve made space to let students think at a more interdisciplinary level, and outside the box.
Unfortunately, teachers often find it difficult to encourage creativity in the classroom if they’re tied to a time-sensitive curriculum that doesn’t leave space for children to explore creative and original ideas. “Originality means that the individual is doing something new or unique,” says Runco. “That’s very difficult to get at in a curriculum, especially one which is designed for a group of students.”
“You don’t just teach creativity in art class or English class. You teach it everywhere.”
John Baer
It would require creativity to be built into elements across the curriculum. “You need to teach creativity everywhere,” says Baer. “You don’t just teach creativity in art class or English class. You teach it everywhere, because creativity in biology is different from creativity in art or music or poetry.”
But even teachers with little room for creativity in the curriculum can still support creative thinking in the classroom by modeling creative behaviour themselves. That could be as simple as showing students something they made for the classroom, or making it clear when they created an original assignment. “If students see a teacher being creative, they’re likely to internalize creativity as a valuable thing,” says Runco.
“Unless we can become better at creative thinking, we’re not going to solve the problems that beset us as a species.”
Bill Lucas
The PISA Creative Thinking questions are available online for educators to look at and perhaps use as inspiration for new classroom activities. Lucas hopes that the outcomes of the PISA test will also inspire other countries to participate in the next iteration of the test. That, in turn, could further improve creative thinking among young people, because education leaders put a lot of value on measuring outcomes and tracking progress. “The true purpose of assessment is not to produce a rank order of either countries or individuals or a set of scores, but to help people get better at learning whatever it is they’re learning,” Lucas says. “And unless we can become better at creative thinking, we’re not going to solve the problems that beset us as a species.”
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